


No Reason to Run

by MadSeason (naive_wanderer)



Series: up in the city (until the stars lost the war) [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, Ba Sing Se, Bisexual Zuko (Avatar), Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Illnesses, Implied Sexual Content, Iroh (Avatar) is a Good Uncle, M/M, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Underage Drinking, Underage Smoking, Zuko (Avatar)-centric, Zuko's chronic illness of the soul, fudging of the canon timeline, it's a doomed relationship but not a bad one, referenced disordered eating
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:15:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28888206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naive_wanderer/pseuds/MadSeason
Summary: [In another life, Zuko finds a poster for a missing bison outside Pao’s teashop, dresses himself in black, and resumes his mission with the kind of single-minded focus he hadn’t been able to muster for months.In this life, Zuko finds a poster for a missing bison, stares at it for a bit with his insides roiling around his heart like a ship caught in a storm, and crumples it up in one hand before tossing it into the trash and going back inside.]Sometime during late spring in the city of Ba Sing Se, Zuko serves tea (badly), falls in love (maybe), and deals with a chronic illness of the soul.AU continuation of "Let the City Pull You Under".
Relationships: Aang & Zuko (Avatar), Iroh & Zuko (Avatar), Jet/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: up in the city (until the stars lost the war) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2118519
Comments: 102
Kudos: 195





	1. Zuko Serves Tea

**Author's Note:**

> So! Here we are, roughly... uh, at least 25k words longer than I originally imagined this would be. I hope it’s worth it! Thank you to [burritosong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/burritosong/pseuds/burritosong) for the title suggestions for both this fic and the series it's part of!
> 
> This is kind of an AU continuation of [Let the City Pull You Under](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25922413), and picks up quite soon after that one ends. I say it’s an AU of an AU because I’d imagined “City” to be more stand-alone, & intended it to otherwise fit into canon as it is (ie Zuko still goes on to choose Azula in crossroads of destiny), but then this idea wouldn’t leave me alone. 
> 
> That said, I think both fics still stand alone—all you need to know going into this one is that Jet never saw Iroh heat his tea, and he was able to to grow a little bit faster after his run-in with Katara, Sokka, & Aang. I think the rest is made clear within the fic itself. Please mind the tags!
> 
> Most of the rest of this is already written, and I’m hoping to get subsequent chapters posted on a somewhat regular schedule!
> 
> .

.

“Tell me what you like about me,” Jet murmurs into Zuko’s ear one evening, when the sky’s gone dark and they’ve made their way back to Jet’s tiny apartment. It’s been hours since their afternoon spent drinking by the square, hours since the _really awful_ outdoor play, and there shouldn’t be anything left to make them tipsy, but Zuko can still feel the blood rushing pleasantly in his head.

He had, on impulse, barely waited for the door to close before dragging Jet in, relaxed and open in all the ways he usually isn’t. And now his ear is getting murmured into.

Zuko says, very eloquently, “Huh?”

Jet’s hands on his waist are a bit cold from being outside, even through layers of fabric, but Zuko isn’t bothered. “You said you like me. Tell me what you like about me.”

Zuko considers refusing, but he feels too nice. He could try _being_ nice. Maybe Li could be someone who is, occasionally, nice.

“I like that you say what you mean,” Zuko says, clumsily. “You say what you think.”

Jet smiles. “And?”

Zuko rolls his eyes. “Really?”

“Come on, I wanna know. All this time you’ve been reaping the benefits of _knowing_ me—”

“Why do you _say_ things like that—”

“—and you won’t even tell me why? And why not say things like that, you seem to like it well enough when I do.” Zuko knows his face has gone very red. “Oh, is that one of the things you like?”

“No.”

Jet laughs. “Come on, just one more thing? I’ll make it up to you. Come _on_.”

He sits on the edge of the mattress, pulls Zuko down with him, half into his lap. Zuko lets him do it, too, lets _himself_ go boneless, the way he’s been letting himself do so many things he hasn’t done until recently, things he didn’t used to want until he _did_ very suddenly want them, with an intensity that surprised him.

Zuko says, feeling a bit out-of-body, “You do the things you say you’re going to do. You said you changed, you were able to change.”

“Well, I’m trying to,” Jet says delightedly, leaning forward. “Not like it happens all at once.”

“People _like_ you,” Zuko goes on, high, suddenly, on the approval, craving it. 

“Not always.”

“You know how to talk to people.”

“Do I?” Jet sounds surprised, maybe, or amused. “Didn’t think I was having much luck with that, recently. You saying I know how to talk to you?”

“Yeah.” And _that’s_ the kind of dumb, mortifyingly sincere thing Zuko shouldn’t be allowing himself to say, but his body hasn’t been checking in with his brain before acting for at least the past hour. Probably hasn’t been doing it for most of Zuko’s life, if he’s honest. 

Maybe Li can afford to be a little sincere. “You’re the only one who’s ever...” 

But he doesn’t let himself finish that thought, just goes still there, half in Jet’s lap with his hands curled around the back of Jet’s neck, his eyes closed. He breathes; hides the flickering upward turn of his lips against Jet’s shoulder.

“Li,” Jet says, quiet. They both know, now, that it isn’t his name, but Zuko answers to it nonetheless. What else can he do? Jet doesn’t know any other names for him.

Jet’s hands move at Zuko’s waist. “Can I tell you what I like about you?”

His breath is very hot. Zuko doesn’t open his eyes. “No.”

The hands stop. “No?”

Zuko’s fingers twitch on the back of Jet’s neck. “No,” he says again, and when he pulls back it’s only so he can lean in again.

Jet, for the moment, does not push it. 

  
  


* * *

  
  
  


In another life, Zuko finds a poster for a missing bison outside Pao’s teashop, dresses himself in black, and resumes his mission with the kind of single-minded focus he hadn’t been able to muster for months.

In this life, Zuko finds a poster for a missing bison, stares at it for a bit with his insides roiling around his heart like a ship caught in a storm, and crumples it up in one hand before tossing it into the trash and going back inside. 

Then he walks back outside, pulls it back out of the trash with shaking fingers, and smooths it out before carefully folding it and sticking it beneath his apron. Then he does the entire thing again—the crumpling, the tossing in the trash, the retrieving—but this time he stuffs it inside his pocket and leaves it there.

He finds many more posters scattered about later. In retrospect it makes complete sense that there would be more than one, so he probably shouldn’t have stuck his hands into the garbage twice.

He still keeps the crumpled one.

The Blue Spirit doesn’t make an appearance that night, or the next day, or the next. Zuko pulls the mask out of his pack and stares at it in the bedroom during the dark, early hours of the morning until his head gets light and his hands start trembling and it’s hard to get them to stop. 

Late in the week, he’s sent home early from work after Pao catches him coughing up a lung over the backroom sink.

It could be a perfect opportunity, Zuko thinks miserably later, huddled under a blanket. The Avatar is here in Ba Sing Se. He could find the bison, he knows how to be stealthy, he knows from paranoid observation how the Dai Li move, he knows they probably have it. He could—he could corner one of the Dai Li, get the information from them, find the bison to hold as leverage, and then—and then—

 _And then what?_ the corner of his brain that sounds like Uncle prompts. _Think. Then what would you do?_

Zuko is wanted for treason, nevermind the fact that he never actually committed it; there’s been no indication that capturing the Avatar at this point would help him. It’s not like he’s even been doing anything worthwhile, lately. His skills aren’t sharp. He’s just been... serving tea, and _going out._

Zuko’s stomach lurches.

“Nephew,” Uncle Iroh says from the doorway, “I’ve made ginger tea.”

Zuko starts to open his mouth to say he doesn’t want any _godsdamned tea, Uncle,_ or else something biting about the last time Uncle Iroh tried to brew something medicinal, but his stomach lurches again. 

He pulls the blanket up over his head.

“I’ll just leave it here, then,” Uncle says, shuffling into the room to set the little tray near Zuko’s head.

“Thank you,” Zuko says from under the blanket, and he thinks he hears his uncle laugh.

  
  
  


Zuko dreams. 

He dreams of—himself, his face unblemished, his hair long and glossy like it was when he was a prince. He used to be a prince.

Zuko dreams of—of—

Nothing, really.

  
  


* * *

  
  
  


One thing that’s new since Jet figured out that Zuko isn’t _Li_ is that they spend more time talking, which Zuko would not have appreciated a month ago but which he does, now, for reasons he can’t explain.

Or, maybe the talking would have happened eventually anyway. Maybe there’s only so long you can keep feeling someone up on street corners and tiny studio apartments before you start wanting to get to know them better.

Although, Jet’s wanted to get to know Zuko right from the start, which is baffling.

It’s nice, anyway, having someone his own age to talk to, even if more than half the time he feels stilted and out of his depth. He doesn’t think he’s _ever_ had someone his own age to talk to, aside from Azula, and Azula’s friends.

“You ever gonna tell me your real name?” Jet asks, an out-of-nowhere question. Jet does that often. Zuko can never quite tell whether they’re meant to suss him out or whether Jet is just genuinely interested. Maybe it’s both.

Zuko looks at him for a moment, at his long legs flung casually across the roof, his head pillowed by one folded arm, his expression unbothered, looking very young in the bright afternoon light.

Instead of answering right away, Zuko takes a bite of the pastry Jet had managed to steal out of some upper ring politician’s garden party. He is—though he will not admit it out loud—impressed that in a city as orderly and well-patrolled as Ba Sing Se, Jet can still skillfully commit petty theft. “I thought you said you didn’t want to know.”

Jet shrugs. He gestures with the hand holding his own, half-eaten pastry. “If you wanna tell me, then I do.”

A small snort of laughter escapes Zuko before he can stop it. It makes Jet grin, at least.

“Will you ever tell me yours?” Zuko deflects.

Jet sits up a little and hums around his next bite, like he knows exactly what Zuko’s doing. He swallows. “It’s Jet. Like I said, just because it’s not my original name doesn’t mean it isn’t the real one.”

That’s fair enough. “Li still isn’t my real name.” Zuko pauses, reflects on the way _Li_ sounds coming out of Jet’s mouth, reflects on how he himself answers to it these days without needing to remember that he should. “Maybe a little.”

Zuko isn’t sure why, exactly, he tells Jet the things he does. Mostly, he avoids examining the thought too closely.

He thinks he’ll be asked again— _so what_ is _your real name?—_ and prepares to steel himself with silence rather than having to outright lie, but instead Jet says, “Do you want it to be your real name?”

No, of course he doesn’t. “I don’t know.”

“It could be, if you wanted.”

Zuko can imagine that, sort of, the name _Zuko_ and the title _Prince_ and the fierce pull of _my nation_ and _my honor_ fading into the background of his life, gradually, like the memory of his mother had. Not gone forever, not forgotten, because it had been there, once; but put behind him, enough that if the past came knocking he could say with certainty that that wasn’t who he was anymore. People can do that, people can change, Zuko knows this now. 

Uncle might even go along with it forever, if Zuko asked.

That’s the scariest part of Ba Sing Se, maybe—not just that Zuko will disappear, but that a part of him _wants_ to, just as fiercely as he wants to get _out_ , and he doesn’t know when that started.

“Li!” Pao shouts from somewhere below them.

Zuko’s lunch breaks are never long enough.

“I should go, anyway,” Jet says, hoisting himself back to his feet. “Smellerbee’s expecting me to help with some delivery job she’s got lined up, and I still have this whole fucking case of rice I found waiting in my apartment.”

“You _found_ ,” Zuko says, not disapprovingly, and Jet smiles again, sharp.

“Well, wherever I got it, there’s a bunch of kids on my street who’ll appreciate it more than whoever it was going to before,” he says, dusting off his clothes. “See you around.”

“ _Li!_ ” Pao yells again, and then Uncle’s voice floating up beside it, “I am sure he is just on his way back now...”

“He’s _coming_ , you old goat,” Jet yells back down, and he swoops forward and kisses Zuko on the mouth before Zuko’s even processed his own swell of boss-related dread. Then Jet promptly hauls himself back down off the roof.

Zuko’s heart thumps.

“Hey, fuck off!” he manages to shout at Jet’s retreating form, far too late to be a good rebuttal, scrambling back down himself.

He’s faced with Pao’s livid stare the second his feet touch the ground. “ _What_ did you say?” 

Pao is a small, soft-looking man. Zuko is taller and in much better shape and, really, has nothing to fear from him.

Behind Pao, Zuko’s uncle makes a rather frantic shushing gesture across his own lips.

“Nothing,” Zuko says, quickly. “I’ll just get my apron.”

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Zuko had not initially done a great job working in the tea industry.

Well. To be fair, he still doesn’t do a great job working in the tea industry.

He’s bad at making tea, he’s bad at remembering orders, he’s bad at being polite—Zuko knows _how_ to be polite, of course, he was raised among nobility with strict rules for proper behavior; but the customs here are slightly different, and there are different rules for ‘polite’ when you’re a server rather than a noble, _and_ he’s so rarely been forced to be polite in the face of entitled middle-aged customers who seem to believe saying ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ will rip their soul out through their nostrils.

What he _can_ do is balance trays extremely well, which is why Pao had promptly put him on serving duty and kept him there... except for when he _does_ in fact have to take orders, or clean, or cover for Uncle, or...

“Perhaps, just—try not to talk, much,” Uncle had advised him with a tight smile when they first started, shortly after Zuko had been informed that saying ‘What do you want?’ wasn’t the correct way to take a customer’s order. Zuko had felt torn between sinking through the floor and unleashing hell on the teashop in the form of colorful insults learned from almost three years at sea.

What he had done instead was breathe in very deeply through his nose and tie a clean apron around his waist, and that’s what he’s been doing nearly every day since.

It’s just like playing a part, Zuko tells himself daily. He’s always enjoyed theatre. At work, he isn’t Zuko—well, he already isn’t _Zuko_ , in Ba Sing Se, he’s Li, but at work he isn’t either of them. He’s a neutral-faced automaton who bows when he’s expected to and memorizes the layout of the shop and its frequent customers like it’s a battlefield. There is the slightly lopsided table that causes a spill nearly every day; Zuko stuffs a bit of rag under one of the legs until it’s stable. There’s the tight-faced woman who screams her order at Uncle every single morning at three minutes past eight exactly, asking for far too much sugar than is reasonable; Zuko sweeps into the back room with a ticket for her order every single morning at eight. The first time he manages to have her order ready for her before she even opens her painted mouth, he has to bite back hysterical laughter at the look on her face.

There’s Pao, who does not seem to have any family _or_ any other employees despite running Pao’s Family Teashop, and who always seems to be yelling at Zuko do something or other. Zuko cannot fathom _why_ because it feels like he’s _always_ doing something or other anyway, but at least the man isn’t Zhao.

(Even Zhao isn’t Zhao anymore, is he.)

This morning, though—this morning he’s on register, because Pao is off and Uncle has to be in the back to brew, because _Zuko_ —despite quite a lot of practice at the frantic urging of Uncle—is still _very bad_ at making tea. Which would be fine, since Zuko has managed to at least not burn everything down while working in the shop alone several times by now and knows how to handle register, except that Uncle has made the shop _extremely popular_ in the last several weeks.

“This price is outrageous!” the current customer at the front of the extremely long line—a man with a pointy face and the limpest mustache Zuko has ever seen—exclaims. “I could get the same thing at Shi’s for half as much!”

Zuko, who does not know much about fair pricing given he had never had to consider price until recently, tries to keep his expression neutral. “Okay, well, would you like to place an order?”

“I said, this price is outrageous!”

“I heard you before.”

“Well?”

Zuko stares. “Well, what?”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Zuko says. “I’m not the one who sets the prices.”

“Then get the owner!”

“He’s out today.”

“Well, then what are you going to do about it?”

“Excuse me,” says a woman further down the line, “can we hurry it up? I’m late for my poetry class.”

“Do you want tea or not?” Zuko snaps.

The man puffs up a bit, face reddening. “I very much _would_ , but as I _said_ , this price is—”

“I can’t _do_ anything about the price,” Zuko says, as calmly as he can manage. After a moment’s thought, he adds, “Sir.”

“ _Well_ ,” the man huffs. “I suppose I’ll just take my business elsewhere!”

“Okay, great,” Zuko sighs. “Then—you, with the poetry class, what do you—”

“Excuse me, there were three people ahead of her!”

“But she said she has to get to—”

“We all have places to be!”

“I cannot believe the audacity,” the man with the limp mustache starts, “I cannot believe you would drive out a paying customer—”

“You said you were going to take your business elsewhere!” Zuko does not scream, and then the entire teashop begins to erupt with chatter. 

Zuko realizes, abruptly, that he has lost control of the situation, if he ever had it in the first place. He very calmly leaves the register and very calmly walks into the back room.

“Z—nephew?” Uncle Iroh says, alarmed. “What’s going on?”

“I am going to kill someone,” Zuko says, very calmly. “I am going to murder someone over tea.”

“Oh, don’t—don’t do that,” Uncle says, craning his neck to peer out into the front, where the angry sounds of disgruntled customers are getting louder. “Uh, what did you—”

“I don’t have any _control over the prices_ ,” Zuko says, loudly but _very calmly_ , and Uncle steers him back towards the teapots with his hands on his shoulders, his grip light like he fears Zuko might break.

“Just pour,” Uncle says placatingly. “Most of these are already done. It will be a shame that they won’t be at the perfect temperature for each customer, but... I doubt anyone will notice. I’ll just—ah, _I’ll_ do register for now.”

“I can’t change the prices,” Zuko repeats.

“No,” Uncle agrees, and with a very tight smile, he steps out into the fray.

* * *

  
  
  


There are more posters outside the teashop. Ba Sing Se’s officials are fast at removing unregulated advertisements, but not as fast as the Avatar’s gang is at putting them up, apparently.

At some point, the Avatar or his friends must have been just outside the shop to put these here. At some point they were here, at a time Zuko wasn’t here, but he also could easily _have_ been here.

One of the posters is upside-down.

“Oh, shit,” Jet supplies, leaning in towards said poster, “that’s Aang’s bison.”

Zuko lets that information bounce around in his brain for a moment, like static electricity. “Aang?”

“The Avatar,” Jet says. 

Zuko’s been sweeping the same exact spot in front of Pao’s shop for the last five minutes, just moving dirt around. He’s distracted not only by the posters, but by the fact that Jet has just come here, in broad daylight; just ambled over clearly to hang out with Zuko, no pretense of trying to be a customer. He’s distracted by the fact that he himself hasn’t questioned this or asked Jet to leave yet, distracted by the fact that Jet being here and his own subsequent feelings on it has actually taken up more of his mental space than the poster.

He and Jet have met up during the day before, of course, and Jet has come to the teashop. He hasn’t said hello to Uncle before, though, like he did today. He brought his _friends_. His _friends are drinking tea inside the tea shop_. Zuko’s _uncle_ is _talking_ to _Jet’s friends_.

“I know it’s the Avatar’s bison,” Zuko snaps, too late to not sound weird. He probably should have remembered the Avatar’s name back when he was tracking him. It seems overwhelmingly stupid now that he didn’t. “How are you on first-name terms with the Avatar?”

Jet shuffles. He’s got that stupid piece of wheat in his mouth again, better than the cigarettes he’d taken up but not by much, and he rolls it around his teeth once before plucking it out with a thumb and two fingers. “I, uh. Well, I met his group once. Before I came here. We didn’t exactly part as friends.” He sticks the wheat stalk back between his teeth. “I don’t really want to run into them again.”

“Huh,” Zuko says, his hands on the broom handle stilling. And then, “Me too,” because his life has crumbled enough that what does it even matter if he admits it?

Jet’s eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. “Really?” He rocks back on his heels, looking thoughtful. “You piss them off enough to encase you in ice, too?”

Zuko doesn’t wince. “Something like that.”

Jet, against _all odds_ , is grinning again. Zuko finds himself distracted by it, the soft upward curve of his mouth. He's able to smile so easily, even at Zuko. “You are a man of _mystery_ , Li. What, don’t tell me you kissed his wannabe-girlfriend too?”

Zuko’s wandering mind screeches to a halt. “ _What_? No! I hadn’t ever—you _know_ I haven’t before—” Jet is laughing at him, crowding in too-close. Zuko scowls. “You kissed the water tribe girl?”

Jet puts his hand on Zuko’s arm. Zuko lets him. “Katara? Yeah.”

Zuko slaps Jet’s hand away with more force than is probably necessary. Jet laughs again, loud and pleased. “You jealous?”

Zuko goes back to sweeping, aggressively. “ _No_.” He hasn’t made any moves to put distance between them. “You have to _want something_ to be jealous.”

More laughter, and it’s driving Zuko insane but he doesn’t want it to stop. Jet leans into his space, puts his hands on either side of Zuko’s face. Zuko stops sweeping. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. You’re the only one I want to kiss right now.”

It’s another one of those odd, sincere things Jet says from time to time, the ones Zuko never has much time to think on before he’s swept up again in physical sensation. He never knows what to say in response, but luckily he doesn’t think he’s expected to say anything. He’s just expected to kiss back, which is not a difficult task.

It’s when he’s in the middle of doing just that that he remembers he’s at work. ‘Remembers’ is probably a generous word, it’s more that—

“Ugh, _Jet_ ,” cuts through Zuko’s brain, and though he’s only met her a handful of times he instantly recognizes it as Smellerbee’s voice. “Don’t you already do that enough?”

  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The dumpling falls apart as soon as Zuko lifts his fingers from the seam. He swears loudly.

“These are the things one must learn in order to find inner contentment with a humble life,” Uncle says serenely from the other side of their table, which Zuko thinks is pretty rich of him considering he gave up almost immediately and foisted the meal prep onto Zuko.

“You grew up in a palace,” Zuko says.

“And now I am here,” Uncle goes on, nodding his head as if Zuko has just made an excellent point, “In Ba Sing Se.”

Zuko, over time, has found that past a certain point it’s best to completely stop acknowledging anything that sounds like sage wisdom coming from his uncle, because Zuko will not understand it anyway, or else he will take it too literally. Regardless, Uncle Iroh will assume that Zuko _has_ understood and is choosing not to listen—which _is_ , admittedly, something Zuko might do if he understood, which he rarely does.

Zuko—who doesn’t, in fact, understand—is currently on his second unsuccessful attempt to fold a dumpling, and he _will_ get the hang of it faster than his senile uncle, thank you very much.

The second dumpling sticks at the seams, but tears open on the other side.

“I think you used too much filling that time,” says Uncle.

Zuko clenches his jaw. “Are you just going to sit there and critique me, or are you going to do something useful?”

“I will clean out the teapots,” Uncle says decisively, making absolutely no move to rise from his seat.

Zuko swallows down his frustration, because he promised he’d ‘try’, though he’s beginning to forget what the point of that promise even was. He starts on the third dumpling. “This is why it’s a better idea to just _hire_ people who know what they’re doing.”

“With what money?” Uncle says good-naturedly. “Do you have a secret income stream up your sleeve, Nephew?”

“No, I’m only _saying_ —”

“Is that what you’ve been doing all those nights out, leaving you poor old uncle home all alone?”

“You know it’s not, and don’t pretend you don’t _love_ having me out of the way so you can go— _woo_ the lady down the hall.” Zuko shudders.

“I can’t deny that I appreciate a good wooing,” Uncle says, stroking his beard, and Zuko doesn’t bother to suppress his second shudder. “But, no, I do not ‘love having you out of the way’.”

Zuko ignores the sincerity. He concentrates on completing the next dumpling, folding just so. “What would you think if I didn’t go out?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem to think it’s important,” Zuko says. “That I do things like that. Normal things.”

Uncle regards him. “I don’t know about what is or isn’t _normal,_ my nephew,” he says at length. “I just like to make fun because it is good to see you acting sixteen.”

Zuko frowns. “I _am_ sixteen.”

“I know. What a world!” says Uncle, smiling. “Did you know, Lu Ten had his first lady friend around your age?”

Zuko can’t help but snap to attention a bit at that, despite his embarrassment. They so rarely even speak of Lu Ten—but Uncle doesn’t look sad, just wistful. “He did?”

“Oh, yes,” Uncle goes on. “He thought he could hide it from me, though. It seems as if you are a bit smarter!”

“I doubt that,” Zuko says immediately. He can’t begin to imagine a world in which that’s true. “Lu Ten was good at almost everything.”

Uncle _laughs_ , full-bellied, and Zuko is caught off-guard. The dumpling gets squished a bit, in the middle, but Zuko barely cares. “ _What_?”

“If he’d ever heard you say that, his head would have swelled so big he’d have been floating for weeks,” Uncle chuckles.

Feeling weird and wrong-footed, Zuko turns his attention back towards the dumpling. “Lu Ten knew what I thought about him,” he mumbles.

This dumpling stays closed, this time, when he lifts his fingers from the seam. It only looks a _little_ lumpy, really. Zuko adds it to the platter to be cooked as Uncle’s chuckles fade away. Only twenty-nine more to go, or something.

“He did know,” Uncle says, reaching around the table to touch Zuko’s shoulder. He lets his hand rest there, for a moment. “Of course, he knew.”

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Ba Sing Se starts to feel less like a temporary reprieve and more like a life. 

Still: Zuko aches all the time. His body yearns for katas, movement, fire. As it is, he can only run through dao drills late at night in the alley behind his apartment that doesn’t really have enough space for it, can only sit with a single candle in the bedroom and breathe heat to get the edge off.

The ‘making out with a tall Earth Kingdom boy on darkened street corners’ helps take the edge off a little, too, to be fair.

“What’d you used to do for fun?” Jet asks one afternoon after Zuko has finished work, blowing cigarette smoke from the side of his mouth. He’s got a package swinging under one arm as they walk, his last delivery for whatever odd job he’s got today. Zuko wonders what Jet misses, what he yearns for, if cigarettes and minor shoplifting and evening trysts take the edge off for him, too.

“Nothing,” Zuko answers, pulling absent-mindedly at a loose thread on his sleeve. He would’ve been chastised for that kind of nervous habit back home, probably. Nervous habits aren’t proper for princes, though he isn’t sure he is one, anymore.

Jet rolls his eyes. “ _Fine_. What did you used to do that was _exciting_?”

Zuko frowns. He isn’t sure how to answer that truthfully, or in any way that doesn’t make him look bad.

Jet says, “Really, man, you’re so subdued all the time—”

“I’m not,” Zuko interjects.

“Why’d you come with me if you don’t wanna talk?”

“You know why,” Zuko says, which makes Jet huff a little laugh.

“Just tell me one thing. It can be stupid, I don’t care. I’ll tell you something, too.” He brightens. “This was pretty fun: I used to nab these _giant_ crates of jelly candy from passing soldiers. Don’t know what the hell they needed all that for, but the kids loved it. Made the effort worth it to see how excited they’d get.”

That’s interesting, in an Earth-Kingdom-treehouse-kid sort of way. It isn’t hard for Zuko to imagine: Jet swinging down from one tree or other with his hook-swords, nabbing something useful, passing it out to small children later like some benevolent leader. He seems like the kind of person who knows what to say to small children.

Zuko maybe shouldn’t be as okay with the idea of Fire Nation troops’ supplies being stolen, but as it is currently those same troops would probably be obligated to hand him over to the chopping block if they found him, so nothing really matters, does it. His life is so different from everything he expected. “I broke into a prison once.”

It was essentially a prison.

Jet whistles. “ _In_ to?”

Zuko feels something in his chest swell up pleasantly. “Yeah. Well, then I also broke back out.” He had help, but. Still.

“What were you doing that for?”

“To get something I needed,” Zuko hedges. “I got to use my dao swords.” Agni, does he miss using the dao swords.

“And that was your idea of fun?” Jet says, eyebrows raised.

Zuko thinks about that, about being the Blue Spirit, someone silent and capable. He thinks about flinging himself from pole to pole with the Avatar, who was easy to work with, when he didn’t know who Zuko was. “Yeah, it was.”

Getting shot in the head with an arrow wasn’t so fun, but the rest, sure.

“That’s way cooler than the thing I said,” Jet pouts. He takes a final drag from his cigarette. “It _does_ sound fun. You should have warned me, I would have told you something better.”

“I didn’t really end up getting the... thing, so.” Zuko says. 

Jet stubs out his cigarette on the side of a bakery wall. “I really miss doing that kind of thing. Stuff that matters, you know. Oh—” he stops suddenly, looking excited. “We should spar, or something, I know a place. I’ve seen you with those swords before but I’ve never actually _seen_ you with them.”

Zuko’s hands itch too much to refuse.

Jet makes his delivery. Zuko watches from the end of the walkway as Jet smiles at the young servant girl from the house’s doorway, makes small talk, stands with his hands in his pockets and an easy charm until she’s giggling into her hand. She leaves, for a moment, and then returns with a tip.

Zuko would have shoved the package at her without looking at her face and then started walking back as quickly as possible. 

Zuko never gets tips.

“Just takes practice, sweetheart,” Jet says pleasantly when Zuko mumbles something to that effect, slinging one arm around Zuko’s shoulders. “I’ve got tons of it. I _always_ get what I want.”

Jet’s sparring-worthy “place” is a dilapidated old mill just outside the inner wall. It takes ages to walk there, and since the daylight is still strong they have to hide their weapons underneath their tunics for most of the way. Once they _do_ get there it smells like wet straw and dust.

It is perfect, though. Way better than Zuko’s back-alley.

Zuko lets his eyes linger on Jet while they warm up, because why the hell not. He’s allowed.

It feels good to handle the dao swords outside of the dead of night; darkness is comfortable, comforting, yes, but tiresome too, after too long. He and Jet set their rules and then they’re facing off on either side of the room, Zuko’s heart fluttering curiously.

He’s never fought someone else with a dual weapon outside of his training, before.

Jet doesn’t make the first move, like Zuko would have thought. He’s probably trying to force Zuko into striking first. Well, Zuko doesn’t have a problem doing that—he moves. So does Jet, a split second later.

It’s dance-like, for a while. Their weapons clash with a sound louder than Zuko expected. Jet is strong, which Zuko already knew. The hooks on his swords force Zuko’s dao to twist, force his whole body to twist, and then Jet _shoves_ and Zuko is down on his knees.

They pause; Zuko gets up, dusts himself off. He says, “Do that again.”

Jet does. Zuko follows the movement this time, lets his body lean into the twisting motion, propels his arms out at the end. One of Jet’s swords knocks out of his grip.

“Oh,” Jet says, delighted. “You’re good.”

Zuko knows he is; he was trained by the best. But there’s still so much more he can learn.

They move, and move, and move, until Zuko hears his breath roaring in his ears almost like fire. Eventually, Jet knocks him down again. Zuko knocks Jet down once more after that, and then he does it again.

Jet swears under his breath as he picks himself up for the third time, eyes bright, grin wide and wild. “Oh, you’re _really_ good.”

They’re both breathing heavily. Zuko doesn’t think he’s felt this exhilarated in months. “Thank you.”

“Knew you would be,” Jet mutters, all pleased intent, and when he moves closer this time he drops his hook swords onto the floor with a clatter. “I knew it.”

Zuko only just manages to drop his stance, to drop his own swords in time before he’s being kissed with an intensity he isn’t used to, Jet’s hands on either side of his face, urgent even though they don’t have to be here in this city. His heart swells up into his throat like a hot air balloon. 

They both kind of stumble down onto the floorboards. Jet shoves his hands underneath Zuko’s tunic. Zuko, flat on his back, feels like he could fly.

Then there’s another clatter some distance away, and the sound of a voice calling out.

Jet drags himself away, swears. “Guess this place isn’t abandoned. Get your swords—”

“You go get _yours_ , that one’s mine—”

“Allright, _allright_ , come on—”

And then Zuko’s getting dragged along with Jet by one hand, just managing to shove the dao back into their sheath as they go. They stumble over a few delipidated barrels on their way outside. It’s loud.

Another shout, from presumably inside. Zuko flings his arm out, but he’s not quite fast enough to stop Jet from tripping over another barrel toppled on the grass. A sound like a frantic hyenalion starts to make its way out of Zuko’s throat.

Jet says, “Oh, fuck this, I used to be _stealthy_ —!” He scrambles to his feet, whipping his head around as... an elderly figure appears in the doorway.

“I keep telling you kids to stop messing around in here!”

Jet has gotten to his feet, has grabbed a hold of Zuko’s elbow. He looks a bit wild. “Hey, come on man, I was _just_ getting lucky!”

The elderly man starts yelling again. He waves a cane.

Jet _pulls_ Zuko through the hole in the fence, like it’s an emergency, like Zuko can’t do it himself. Zuko lets him. That breathless hyena-sound climbs out of his mouth again. “Are you _serious_?”

“He can’t catch us, anyway,” Jet grins, and then they’re running together through damp back-alleys, running from an _elderly man with a cane_ , hidden well in the lengthening evening shadows. When they’ve been running a while, when they round the third corner, Zuko has to stop to double-over, wheezing, clutching his belly. 

“Are you _laughing_?” Jet gasps, leaning over with him, and Zuko can’t answer. He thinks there are tears in his eyes. “You are!” Jet cries. “I didn’t think you _could_ laugh like that.”

“Fuck you,” Zuko wheezes. “Fuck—”

“Maybe later,” says Jet, and then he’s laughing, too. They stand there, hands on their knees, laughing and laughing until someone in one of the apartments above yells at them to knock it off or they’ll dump their mother’s bed pan on them, which only makes Jet laugh harder.

They do move on quickly, though, to avoid the bed pan. 

  
  
  


Zuko spots the Avatar plastering up more posters in the lower ring on his way back home alone. 

He stares, for a moment or two. He observes his own frantic pulse as if from a distance, hears it rushing in his ears.

Then he turns and continues walking back towards the apartment, his head down. He passes by one of the Avatar’s friends, the Water Tribe boy, as he goes. The boy doesn’t notice, doesn’t even spare Zuko a second glance.

Zuko’s own crumpled missing-bison-poster burns a hole in his pocket.

It doesn’t literally burn—thank Agni, Zuko has enough control now to prevent that—but by the time he gets back home his skin burns hot, hot, hot.

  
  


* * *

“I don’t understand how you’re sick again,” Uncle Iroh sighs in the morning, ignoring as Zuko tries to swat his uncle’s hand off his forehead. 

It’s not like Zuko can make heads or tails of it, either. “I’m fine, just let me get up so I can get ready for work.”

“You have a fever,” Uncle argues. “You can’t go to work.”

“I’m fine.”

“Nephew,” Uncle sighs. “There is no need to be so pigheaded. Just think of it as a day off, I will explain it to Pao. You hate it there, anyway.”

“Yeah, but we need money,” Zuko insists. “If we only get your pay today, then we’ll only have enough for either a new plant or the groceries that we _actually need_ , and _you’ll_ come home with a new plant.”

Uncle chuckles. “You worry too much.”

“I don’t _worry_ too much, you literally don’t understand how money works. You’re going to pass by that market on the way back, you won’t be able to control yourself. I should go in—”

“If you go in, you will push yourself too hard and you will take longer to recover, and then we will lose _more_ money,” Uncle says, firmly, pushing Zuko back down. “Stay home. Don’t worry, I will mind the budget. I will not come home with a new plant.”

So Zuko sleeps most of the day, and he dreams.

He dreams of himself sitting on a throne, his face whole, his hair glossy and unshorn. On either side of him are dragons, one red and one blue, and they whisper jumbled truths at him that make his teeth rattle. He wakes up before he can decipher what they have to say.

In the evening, his fever is gone, and Uncle has returned with a new decorative scroll from the market. It has a painting of a plant on it.

.


	2. Zuko Does Not Capture the Avatar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm hoping to put somewhere between 4 days-1 week between chapters from here on out. Wish me luck!

.

When Zuko was thirteen, his father burned him and cast him out. Uncle Iroh cast himself out with Zuko.

They have never outright talked about it much, because Zuko has never allowed it. But now, in a city so large that it suffocates, the city where Uncle’s son died, the city where Zuko wakes silently in the night with chills that come from nowhere, Zuko wants to. He needs to.

He doesn’t know how to, though. Neither does Uncle Iroh, really. When Zuko starts feeling like he’s filled with glass, Uncle—with preternatural understanding—gives him tea, gives him small tasks to do, something to keep his hands busy, something to keep him from bursting and spilling his jagged pieces out on the floor where they might hurt someone else; but he waits for Zuko to talk about it, and Zuko almost never knows what to say.

Uncle is almost always already up when Zuko wakes, as if he is expecting it.

On such a night, what comes out of Zuko’s mouth is, “I had a dream that I wasn’t scarred.” It could have been the dream he’d just woken from, or something from another night; Zuko can’t tell. He’s taken the cup his uncle has handed him automatically, but he probably won’t drink. He hardly ever does.

“Not scarred, or not burned?” Uncle asks.

Zuko shrugs.

He doesn’t remember much of the first few weeks after the Agni Kai; even less of the days immediately following it, or the hours—but he does remember some. He remembers how he had wept when his hair was shorn, wept when the ship left the dock, wept when he saw his new face for the first time. How his uncle had wept over him in the infirmary before they left, when he thought Zuko wasn’t awake to know.

After all that, Zuko’s tears had dried up and he hadn’t been able to find them again no matter how much his heart ached. It all just turned to rage, sometimes loud and sometimes very very quiet, because Zuko had trouble figuring out which he preferred. That was comforting, in its own way.

He wonders if Mother would ever have guessed what would happen to him. She protected him, once, when Zuko was too young to protect himself, but he should have been strong enough by the time he was thirteen. He should have protected himself. He should have, for her, but he didn’t.

He wonders if she would cry if she saw his face now, or if she would even recognize him.

(Just thinking about it at all feels self-indulgent. Zuko is disgusted by his own desire to _talk_ about it.)

“What else happened in your dream?” Uncle prompts.

“Nothing,” Zuko answers. “I was just...” he waves a hand at his face. 

Uncle doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. Zuko leans forward and rests his forehead on his knees, careful to keep the teacup from spilling. 

“The sun won’t be up for hours yet,” Uncle says eventually. “You should sleep.”

“So should you,” says Zuko, to his knees. “You’re old, you need it more, you don’t need to keep me company.”

“I’m not _that_ old.”

Neither of them move. Zuko supposes that, if there is one thing that marks him and Uncle Iroh as related, it’s stubbornness.

Zuko does finally begin to doze, though, close to dawn. Uncle takes the teacup, gone cold, out of his slackening hand before it has a chance to fall.

  
  


* * *

  
  


There’s a girl in the teashop who’s been watching them for a few days.

“Ah, yes,” Uncle says placidly when Zuko points this out, “she _has_ been keen on you, hasn’t she?”

Zuko says, “What?”

“She isn’t a spy, Nephew,” Uncle clarifies. He’s been getting _slightly_ better at that, these days—saying things in a way Zuko can understand. “It looks like she has quite the crush on you!”

Zuko barely manages to hang onto his tray. “ _What?”_

“Is that really such a surprise?” Uncle laughs. “Ah, to be in the prime of one’s youth—”

“I’m not in the prime of my youth,” Zuko hisses. “I’ve got—” _more important things to worry about_ , but that _really_ isn’t true, is it? “But I’m already— _seeing_ someone.”

“Ah, yes, you _have_ been doing quite a lot of that,” says Uncle, in a tone that makes Zuko narrow his eyes. “But _she_ does not know that, does she?”

A blind panic rises in Zuko. “So what do I do?”

Uncle raises his eyebrows. “Well, if she asks, you’ll have to tell her!”

“That’s none of her business!”

“Then you will have to think of some other way to let her down gently,” Uncle remarks, like it’s nothing. “Oh, I do envy you. To be young again, pursued on all sides by multiple—”

“Uncle, she’s _coming over_.”

“Nephew,” Uncle says gently, touching his arm once before backing away to leave Zuko to the viperwolves, “be kind.”

“I don’t want to _be kind_ ,” Zuko whispers hysterically to his Uncle’s back, “I don’t want to _be in this situation at all_.”

Before he can pull himself together, the girl has placed some coins down by the counter, a pleasant smile on her face. “Thank you for the tea,” she says. “What’s your name?”

She has very big eyes. 

“My name’s Li,” Zuko manages—very normally, like a normal person—over the blaring alarm sirens in his brain. “Uh. My uncle and I just moved here. I mean, we didn’t _just_ move here, but. Yeah.”

“Hi, Li,” the girl goes on, still smiling. “My name’s Jin. Thank you, and... well, I was wondering if you would like to go out sometime?”

Uncle was right. Somehow, Uncle was right. Uncle was—

“Uh,” Zuko says.

Jin’s smile falters, just a little. “Um! It’s okay, if you don’t want to...”

“No,” Zuko says, and then, immediately, “I mean, that’s not what I meant! It’s just that, uh. You seem... nice. It’s not that you’re not nice. Or that I don’t like going out. Which I do.”

What in the actual fuck is he saying—

“Okay,” says Jin. And then she stands there, waiting, tilting her head just slightly, as though Zuko hasn’t revealed himself to be incapable of normal human interaction.

“I’m already dating someone,” Zuko blurts, heart hammering more than it ever has on any of his most dangerous missions, for _Agni’s_ sake.

“Oh!” Jin says, and though her voice is bright she isn’t able to completely hide her disappointment. “Well, that definitely makes sense.”

Zuko has no clue what that means. “Um, sorry.”

Jin... laughs. “Don’t be! That’s why I asked, right?”

“I—yes,” Zuko says, clumsily. “Uh. Thank you. For asking?”

Jin smiles, bites the inside of her cheek a bit, and Zuko realizes that he disappointed her, but he didn’t _hurt_ her. “Any time. Thanks again for serving me tea. Have a nice day, Li.”

She leaves with just a short glance back, still with a little smile on her face, and Zuko watches her go, still clutching his serving tray.

Uncle appears out of nowhere to elbow Zuko in the ribs. “See, that was not so bad!”

“It _was_ ,” Zuko says, even though it wasn’t.

* * *

  
  


Of the myriad things Zuko has lost from his old life (old lives), what comes to mind more often than he would have expected is the sea.

He’d gotten so awfully seasick, those first few weeks of his banishment; had been so humiliated and angry that the first impression he gave to a crew that he was supposed to be _leading_ was that one of someone weak, and wounded, who didn’t have legs yet for the ocean. He had spent a lot of time, once he was able to be up and walking regularly, staring at the sea, cursing it, begging it by turns to carry him where he needed to go or else swallow him before he had to face the consequences of yet another failure.

The sea never really listened to Zuko. Which, when it came down to it, was a familiar and familial reaction to Zuko’s cursing and Zuko’s begging, so the sea became something of a fast friend. One that he hated, frequently, but that was familiar too.

A street vendor on Zuko’s route to work has whipped salt and steam into the air, scent memory, so he’s still thinking of the sea when he nearly walks right into the Water Tribe girl.

At first he almost thinks she’s a figment of his imagination, brought on by visions of water and water _bending_ —but no, it’s obviously really her. The Avatar’s here in Ba Sing Se, and so are his friends. They’re likely not staying in the lower ring, Zuko knows, but he’s physically almost run into them here twice. Are they still looking for the bison? Are they gearing up to do something else?

The Water Tribe girl—Katara—she’s got her nose buried in some kind of scroll, and Zuko has his hat on low enough that it shades a good portion of his face, so she doesn’t notice him. It’s crowded on the street, as well; she could have almost bumped into anybody. She only mumbles a quick “excuse me” as they swerve around each other, and then Zuko watches her walk away, his mouth dry, pulse pounding against his throat.

She’s wearing her mother’s necklace. He remembers the weight of it in his hand.

And Zuko—he walks away and doesn’t look back, for the second time now, and goes to work.

He wants to spar again, desperately, wants to slide off again into the evening light with the one person in this hellish city who doesn’t blame him for being angry, wants to do the things that siphon off his energy and leave him feeling sated, feeling pleasantly blank; but by the time the sun starts to set Zuko can no longer hide the sounds of his own coughing in his sleeve, and he’s sent home again. 

Once there he wants just as desperately to meditate, but every time he tries to sit up for longer than a few minutes he gets dizzy.

“Perhaps you should spend more time relaxing after work and a little less time going out,” Uncle says pointedly when he returns to the apartment, moving through the room to straighten up. “It’s not good for you to keep getting fevers like this.”

“Uncle, I’m not getting sick from... outings,” Zuko grumbles from his bedroll, even though he doesn’t actually know if that’s true. Jet hasn’t been sick as far as he knows, at least. “I _am_ sick of sitting and doing nothing and making _tea_ and being _nice_ and playing _pai sho_.”

“You hardly do any of those things,” Uncle says pleasantly, and when he leans down to pick up a stray bit of clothing, there is the sound of crinkling paper.

That’s right, Zuko thinks. When he got home, he’d stumbled out of his tunic and pants and left both on the floor before hauling himself into bed, with the crumbled poster still in the pocket.

Uncle Iroh smooths the poster out in his hands. Zuko turns his body away before he has to see the look on his Uncle’s face. He pulls the blanket all the way up to his chin like a child. 

“Ah,” Uncle says from behind him. “This is the young avatar’s bison.”

An expectant pause, and it occurs to Zuko that he’s probably meant to say something. “Yeah.”

“What are you going to do with this information?”

Zuko just wants to sleep. “Nothing.”

He hears Uncle shifting behind him. “You’re going to do nothing, but you kept this in your pocket?”

“Yes.”

“Nephew—”

“I kept it there to remind myself that I’m not going to do anything,” Zuko says, feeling slightly unhinged. “I’m not going to do anything. I found it twelve days ago and I haven’t done anything.”

He can hear his uncle sit down behind him. “You kept it in your pocket for twelve days to remind yourself that you aren’t going to do anything?”

“What do you expect me to do?” Zuko explodes, flipping back over. The room around him spins. “I thought about it, but what am I going to do with a bison? I don’t have a ship, I don’t have anything, I wouldn’t be able to—it probably wouldn’t even fit inside this apartment.”

“Probably not,” says Uncle, looking around.

“I mean, what does it even eat? How would I get—and people would notice that, right? Me with a giant, flying bison? I couldn’t possibly lay low like that.”

“Ah, yes, you’re right,” Uncle nods, a note of something in his voice that Zuko can’t decipher. “On further thought that would be quite reckless.”

* * *

  
  


“A girl asked me on a date the other day,” Zuko says, as they sit eating a cobbled-together breakfast in Jet’s cramped apartment, and Jet chokes a bit on his rice.

Zuko stares down at his own bowl—half-eaten again, he can’t seem to find his appetite anymore—and expects to be made fun of, maybe, laughed at over the fact that someone out there apparently found him interesting or attractive enough to ask out; but after a second or two of coughing Jet only wheezes, “Did you already know her? Or was it a customer?”

Zuko frowns, unsure how he feels about Jet’s assumption that Zuko knows anyone else in this city other than him and his uncle. “A customer. You don’t think it’s weird?”

“What,” Jet says, incredulous, “that somebody asked you out?”

Zuko flushes. “Yes!”

“Man, see, this is where I genuinely don’t get you,” Jet says, a bit of laughter in his voice. Zuko hates and longs for that tone, for the look and touch that usually comes with it. “ _I_ had my eye on you and did something about it, didn’t I? So no, I don’t think it’s _weird_ that someone would wanna ask you out.”

To which Zuko says, “Oh.”

Jet pokes at his food, suddenly not looking at Zuko. “So, what did you say to her?”

“I said no,” Zuko answers, frowning. “What else would I have said?”

Jet shrugs uncomfortably. “I dunno. It’s not like we’ve talked about this.”

Zuko sits up straighter, nerves on edge. “I mean, I’m already—you know. Seeing _you_.”

“Yeah,” Jet says.

“So,” Zuko says.

“So,” Jet says, too casual. “You said no. Good.”

Zuko frowns harder. “What would _you_ have said?”

“I would’ve said no too,” Jet says, entirely too flippant for someone who’s nervously building a rice tower with their chopsticks. “Don’t get your pants in a bunch.”

“I’m not the one with my pants in a bunch,” Zuko snaps. “Why are you like this?”

Jet smirks. “Like what?”

“Like that!” Zuko hisses. “Always—laughing at me, being cryptic—”

“I’m not _cryptic_ ,” Jet frowns. “ _You’re_ cryptic. _I_ just didn’t want you to think that I’m telling you what to do, or being, you know, weird and jealous or something.” He stabs at his bowl with his chopsticks again. “ _Obviously_.”

Zuko sits back, deflating, unsure what to do with that. He feels, sometimes, like other people operate on a level of social nuance that he will simply never be able to comprehend. “Why would that be obvious?”

“Because we haven’t really _talked_ about it yet,” Jet snaps, like it pains him. “I wanted to leave you an out in case I had the wrong idea.”

“Oh,” Zuko says again. That doesn’t seem like a very Jet thing to do, somehow. Maybe he needs to adjust his mental image. “I mean, you didn’t. I mean, I thought we _did_ talk, in the shop when you—and I’m—I’m—I’m _sleeping_ with you, aren’t I?”

Which is, Zuko has to admit to himself, perhaps a bit confusing after all, because he’d started doing _that_ long before he’d started thinking of himself and Jet as _together_.

Jet’s face is _red_ as he stabs his chopsticks into the bowl again, staring at it rather than at Zuko. Zuko doesn’t think he’s ever seen him blush. “Spirits, man, do you really need every little thing explained to you?”

“ _What_?”

“ _Hooking up_ and _seeing someone_ are not the same thing, _obviously_ —”

“Obviously,” Zuko echoes again.

“—and at some point you gotta figure out which one you’re doing, and I can never figure out what the hell it is you _want_ , and you haven’t been taking literally _any_ of my hints to talk—”

“I haven’t?”

“No,” Jet says sourly, “you haven’t.”

Zuko doesn’t think he’s ever felt this torn between humiliation and delight. “Well, _you_ might know all about this kind of thing, but _I_ don’t,” he snaps, face heating. “I _assumed_ we were already...”

And Jet—whatever bad temper had come over him clears like it was never there. “Well, good.”

“Good?”

“Yeah,” Jet says, smiling a bit as he looks at Zuko out of the corner of his eye. “Good.”

It’s not a smirk or a grin or anything like the expressions Zuko has come to expect on his face. It’s just a smile. 

_Good_ , Zuko thinks, and doesn’t bother to stop himself smiling back.

* * *

  
  


The Avatar—Aang—spots _Zuko_ on his return from picking up special-order sweet potato cakes in the middle ring. 

They’ve already locked eyes, but Zuko turns on his heel and starts power-walking in the opposite direction anyway, ignoring the indignant shout of “You! Hey!” trailing behind him after a moment of utter silence.

The Avatar is alone, nobody else has recognized Zuko, maybe if Zuko just keeps walking, keeps pretending he didn’t see him then he’ll leave him alone—

“Zuko,” the Avatar says, in a voice too stern for a pre-teen, and he grabs Zuko’s shoulder. 

Zuko shrugs him off, heart thundering. “It’s Li,” he says through his teeth, not slowing in his pace, keeping his gaze straight ahead. The Avatar keeps up at his right side.

“What?”

“ _Li,_ ” Zuko hisses, “my _name_ , it’s Li.”

Understanding dawns. The Avatar lowers his voice to nearly a whisper. “Oh. Uh, well, I’m still Aang—” _spirits_ , why is this happening, is he actually playing along—“and I want to know what you’re doing here.”

Zuko’s face heats up. “I live here.”

“In Ba Sing Se?”

“Yes, in Ba Sing—where else?”

He rounds a corner at random. Aang follows.There are fewer people walking this way, at least; it seems more residential, probably almost everyone is out at work, probably nobody will hear them—

“Why?”

“What do you mean, _why_?”

“Why would you be living in an Earth Kingdom city?”

“Because I have to live somewhere!”

“Come on, you know what I mean, it’s just—didn’t you have a whole,” Aang waves his arms around a bit, frowning, eyes wide, “a whole ship! That you used to chase me!”

That one gives Zuko pause. He stops on a side street, package clutched tight to his side, and tries to clear his head. His heart is still thumping wildly, but given that the Dai Li haven’t rounded him up yet he doesn’t think anyone else has heard their conversation, and this is the first thing Aang’s said that has started to convince him that maybe he isn’t trying to retaliate. Maybe he’s just confused.

And Zuko doesn’t owe him anything, of course, but—

“First of all, no, I did not have a ship, because I am a _refugee_ ,” Zuko says, pointedly, as quietly as he can manage, “and I have never _met you before_ , but if I _did_ it would have gotten blown up by pirates and most of the crew would have died in the North.”

Aang stares. He says, in a small voice, “Oh.”

“So I’m _done_ ,” Zuko goes on, “because I no longer have the, the hypothetical ship, and I’m _done_ with the mission because I _failed_ at the mission—the mission that I didn’t have, to begin with, so there was nothing to fail,” his head spins, “because I’m just a, a very normal, regular person from the Earth Kingdom.”

“Named Li,” Aang says.

“Yes,” Zuko says, “that is my name.”

There is a beat of silence. Aang has locked eyes with him again and Zuko can’t seem to get himself to look away. 

Aang says, “You’re a really terrible liar,” and Zuko promptly resumes speed-walking.

So does Aang. He might actually be rolling along with the air currents. “So you don’t have Appa?”

“What?”

“My flying bison!”

“Why,” Zuko almost shouts, “would I have your bison!”

“Because you’re trying to lure me in!”

“ _I’m_ trying to go back to work! You’re the one talking to me!” 

“You have a job?”

“For the love of—” Zuko stops again by some trash bins behind a bakery—it might be the same bakery he was just walking away from, who knows, he’s gotten so turned around—and turns, maybe a little hysterical. “Yes, I have a _job_ , I _live_ here, I did not plan to run into you, can I _go_ now?”

Aang looks up at him. He’s so... short. “So you don’t want to capture me?”

“I don’t understand,” Zuko says, and he thinks he might have started sweating, “do you _want me_ to capture you?”

“No, I just—”

“Then leave me alone!”

“So that’s really it?” Aang nearly shouts, his voice full of feeling, far too young. “You spent months trying to track me down and now we bump into each other in Ba Sing Se and you’re just _done?_ ”

“Yes!” Zuko nearly shouts back. “Why are you upset about this!?”

“Because I don’t _understand_ you!” Aang looks like he might tear out his own hair, if he had any. “I thought it was all, honor this, honor that, I have to capture the Avatar, but now you don’t care!?”

Zuko whispers, “Keep your voice down, what’s wrong with you?”

“Keep my—you were _literally_ just yelling!”

“I can’t get my honor back,” Zuko hisses. “I lost my chance.”

“And that’s such a big deal that you have to, what, exile yourself?”

“What?” says Zuko. “I’ve been banished for—I _can’t_ go back, you idiot, they don’t _want_ me. It’s treason.”

And Zuko doesn’t know what he expects—to be laughed at, maybe, or belittled, it’s not as though it wouldn’t be justified—but all Aang does is say, “That’s awful,” like he didn’t already know all that.

 _That’s awful_. It sticks in Zuko’s ear, a tinny echo. Maybe Aang _didn’t_ know. “It’s what I deserve.”

“Why?” Aang goes on, sounding upset. Why is he upset? “You’re not even—you’re a kid, aren’t you? You look really young without your ponytail.”

“Uh, _okay_ —”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” Zuko answers without thinking, and then he snaps his mouth closed, because _why is he standing here by some trash bins talking to the Avatar?_

“Man,” Aang says, like an aside, “it really would have helped if we’d had this conversation sooner instead of you throwing fireballs at me all those times.”

Zuko’s pulse picks up again. He doesn’t think anyone in the distance heard the word ‘fireballs’, but still—“Stop talking. I’m leaving now.”

“Hey,” Aang says again, jogging to keep up, a _whoosh_ of air helping him along, “is your uncle okay?”

“What?”

“From—when we—your sister, when we all ran into her in that empty town,” Aang says awkwardly, “he was hurt. Is he okay?”

Zuko exhales. “Yes. Leave him alone.”

“I wasn’t planning on—”

“ _Leave him alone_.”

“I just wanted to say I’m glad he’s okay.”

Zuko wants to scream that if Aang were really so concerned about his or his uncle’s well-being, he would have given himself up honorably back when Zuko still had a passing chance at redemption. “You’re too trusting!” is what he says instead. “Why are you still talking to me, why didn’t you run and tell your _friends—”_

“Do you _want_ me to?”

“No, but that’s not—”

“Why did you break me out of the Pohuai Stronghold?”

Zuko reels. “Because it wouldn’t count if I wasn’t the one to—you _stupid_ —” He’s _dying_ to call up the fire, sweat has sprung out all over his skin just with the effort of keeping it down. “I don’t need your pity, you have _no reason_ to trust me, you should—you should go, before I do something dangerous to you!”

“Are you going to?” Aang says, calling his bluff, but that’s not the point.

“That’s not the point!”

“Because it sounds like—”

“You just can’t go around trusting people, you can’t go around forgiving them, that’s the kind of behavior that will get you and your _friends killed._ ”

Aang steps back, but he doesn’t look nervous. “I didn’t say anything about _forgiving_ or _trusting_ just yet,” he says, reasonably, “but the monks did teach—”

“I don’t care,” Zuko interrupts, his heart racing again. “I can’t be—I don’t want to talk to you anymore, go away.”

“Well that’s pretty rude,” Aang mutters.

“Go away!” Zuko says again, and Aang holds up his hands, an exaggerated cringe on his face. 

“Allright, allright, _sheesh_.”

And he does go away, turns and walks off down another street with only a single glance back, just like that.

Zuko takes one moment, two, three, just to stand there and breathe and get his heart under control. He’s too hot; his inner layers have started to stick to his skin with sweat. White spots bloom in front of his eyes. He closes them, for just a moment.

When he opens them, he looks around and realizes he has no idea where he is.

Most of the sweet potato cakes can’t be sold because Zuko had been squeezing the box too hard on his belated way back, and they’ve been flattened. It comes out of his pay.

Zuko’s resulting fury and budget-despair powers him through the rest of his shift, through mounting temperature and swimming vision, until closing, when he eats all of the flattened ones in the back room on his break, ignoring the chills that have come over him. He does _not_ share with Uncle Iroh.

  
  
  


At night, Zuko dreams of two dragons.

 _Oh_ , says the blue one at his unburned left side, close enough to caress. _Giving up, are we? It’s about time_.

The red one just says his name, over and over, until it’s meaningless, until it sounds like nothing and tastes like ashes in Zuko’s mouth.

* * *

  
  


“Who lives in a place like that?” Jet comments disapprovingly as they approach the sprawling family home with its cheery green-tiled roof. Precious little shrubberies dot the courtyard. “Who needs that much space?”

“Didn’t you live in a forest?” says Zuko. 

“Not all that space was _mine_ ,” says Jet. “It was shared.”

“Maybe more than one family lives here,” Zuko offers, but he doubts it. The house is grand compared to the lower ring, and even most of the other houses in the middle ring, but of course Zuko’s seen bigger. “This is my last one, hang on.”

He leaves Jet at the path as he heads up the walkway.

This isn’t Zuko’s first tea delivery to this particular area—Uncle’s specific brews and highly-specific accompanying instructions have gotten popular among the businesspeople and students of Ba Sing Se, most of whom Zuko assumes must spend their days hunched over some desk, hopped up on whatever the opposite of calming tea is. Normally, when he’s been up this way, so close to the upper ring, he’s greeted by a servant rather than an actual resident—which makes perfect sense to Zuko—but _today_ he’s greeted by what seems to be the lady of the house, apologizing profusely for her servant’s incompetence... and her very strong lavender perfume. 

Zuko, though his stomach twists unpleasantly, resists the urge to cover his nose with his hand. That’s probably not good food service decorum. It certainly would have made him angry when he was a prince.

“Oh, my word,” the woman gasps almost immediately once she’s gotten the door open, snapping back the hands she’d outstretched for the package. “Your _face_.”

She’s _loud_ about it, is the thing. Probably isn’t used to having to hold her tongue, if Zuko had to hazard a guess, which Zuko is... unfortunately, he’s familiar with that particular vice. Just as unfortunately, several people passing by stop for a moment to crane their heads.

It’s not like this isn’t an interaction Zuko’s had before, but it’s been a while. These days, when people make a _thing_ of it, they usually just avert their eyes until they get used to it, or try to engage in some kind of conversation with him about it in a misguided show of solidarity. 

Still. It’s hardly like he’s the only person in the world with a burn scar. He’s just trying to do his spirits-damned _job_ which he _hates_ , and he already can’t stand to be close to this lady longer than he needs to because of that disgusting perfume smell, she doesn’t need to—

“Excuse me,” the woman says, entirely too loud, waving one hand in front of her. Zuko catches another whiff of lavender. “Can you hear me? Oh no, are you deaf?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Zuko can see Jet shifting slightly.

“I can hear you,” Zuko says. He tries not to breathe in too deeply, thinks maybe his hands have started to go numb. “Have I done something to offend you?”

The woman covers her mouth and nose with one elegant sleeve, as if it’s a smell she dislikes rather than a sight. If only Zuko could do the same. “ _Well_ , young man, I simply was not expecting to see something like that when I placed my order for delivery. I simply was not. Don’t tell me that was from a _tea_ accident, surely? What kind of business is Pao running down there?”

“It wasn’t from a _tea accident_ ,” Zuko says, voice flat. Uncle would be disappointed if he lost his temper now, so he forces himself into some sort of bow, forces his numb hands to hold out the package again, tries not to breathe through his nose. “Please, take your order.”

“Then what _was_ it from?” the woman asks.

Zuko doesn’t straighten up. He thinks if he looks at her he might actually snap. “Fire,” he answers. “Please take your order, _madame_.”

“Have you ever tried makeup?” she says, _genuinely_ , like she’s being helpful, and she _still hasn’t taken her delivery_. “It can do wonders these days!”

Zuko just stares straight ahead at her, vision tunneling, lavender filling his senses.

Then, suddenly, Jet’s hand is on his upper arm. Zuko can barely feel it. He doesn’t know when exactly Jet walked over.

“Hey, hi,” Jet says to the woman, all wide smile. “Here’s a thought: why don’t you shut your stupid fucking mouth for once in your life?”

Zuko barely sees her scandalized response, barely hears it, because that _smell_ is still sticking in his nose and his blood is roaring in his ears and then Jet is dragging him away, down the main road and then a side street, out of the way of people and prying eyes.

Zuko is still holding on to the package. His hands shake, and he drops it.

“Leave it,” Jet tells him as his footsteps stutter, “it doesn’t matter.”

Zuko wants to protest—it was the _one thing_ he was supposed to do today and he has to do something to pull his weight in this city, he has to _try_ —but his body doesn’t seem to be paying full attention to his brain, so he lets himself be pulled along, Jet’s hand like a brand around Zuko’s upper arm.

Zuko struggles to keep the surge of fire rising in his chest down because he can’t let it out, not here. The scent of perfume-lavender-antiseptic is still stuck to his clothes, and his skin, and then his stomach is cramping and his mouth is starting to water, and all of a sudden it’s too much. “Get off me—get off—”

Jet lets go all at once, like he’s been burned, and Zuko doesn’t have time to wonder whether he _has_ before he’s stumbling to the street corner so he can lean over and throw up into some unlucky business owner’s decorative shrubs.

When he straightens back up, Jet is still standing nearby, facing off to the side, almost like a lookout. His eyes dart over. He doesn’t look burned.

Zuko wipes his mouth with his sleeve.

“Come on,” Jet says, ambling closer, like he didn’t just watch Zuko lose his breakfast in public. “Let’s just... go get lunch or something.”

Zuko’s body is still buzzing. “I should go.”

“What, are you gonna go back to work like this?” says Jet. “Come on. You can spare ten minutes.”

So Zuko relents, and Zuko lets Jet lead him down another street to a food stall, and Zuko lets Jet sit him down on a bench near a rickety dining table while he buys two bowls of noodles—actually buys them with actual money.

Zuko takes the bowl offered to him and feels like he might explode. “I’m not hungry.”

“Just eat it,” Jet says, sitting down next to him, not acknowledging what a weak fool Zuko had made of himself ten minutes ago, and Zuko can’t take it.

“Why are you doing this?”

Jet throws him a highly offended glance. “What do you mean, _why_?”

“You don’t need to _protect_ me.”

“I know I don’t,” Jet shoots back. “But what are you gonna do about it?”

There’s a challenge in Jet’s eyes, yes, but underneath that is just—an uneasiness, Zuko thinks. A vulnerability he isn’t used to seeing. Zuko sits with that a minute, tries to calm the racing part of his brain that insists any kindness directed at him is a trap.

Resists the wild, foolish urge to say, _if you knew who I was, who I used to be, if you knew, you wouldn’t—_

Zuko should eat, but his stomach is still roiling. He takes a bite anyway, swallows. Breathes steadily through his nose until it comes a little easier, until the only scent on the air is food and humidity, late spring.

They eat for a bit in silence.

“That lady was an ass,” Jet mutters, breaking Zuko out of his blank headspace, and he looks over to find that Jet has already set aside his empty bowl on the table nearby. “People like that, they haven’t known a day’s hardship in their lives. They shouldn’t get to talk to anyone else that way. She probably—she probably has people who do her _hair_ for her. She probably sleeps on a mattress full of baby tortoiseswan feathers.”

Zuko used to have his hair done for him. He used to sleep on a mattress filled with—some kind of feathers, anyway. 

“Thank you,” leaves his mouth in an embarrassed whisper.

“You don’t have to thank me, I didn’t fucking do anything except lose you a customer. I should’ve at least thrown the delivery at her.” Jet sighs. He pulls a cigarette out of his pocket, lights it up with a match, gestures at Zuko’s half-eaten food. “You should finish that before it gets cold.”

“I said I’m not hungry.”

“Okay.”

Zuko watches Jet smoke, for a minute, like it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever seen in his life. The sounds of the people around them fade into white noise, making the bench and the table and the space between them feel like its own private bubble.

“Longshot and Smellerbee were surprised I took to this,” Jet muses, catching his gaze. He taps the cigarette still burning in his hand. “The smoke doesn’t bother me, though. It never has.”

Zuko hums his understanding. Smoke has never bothered him, either, or fire, not even after he was burned. Why would it? It’s what he’s made of. Bending it had been a bit of a different story, but that had come back, in the end.

“It’s more the sound,” Jet goes on, pensive. “Fire has this specific sound, you know, when it’s gotten too big. Out of control. When it hurts someone.” He stops, suddenly, clears his throat, takes another drag. His hands tremble, a bit.

Zuko does know that sound. He’s lived in it, caused it, even, been the one making it on both sides. The roar of it filled his ears and drowned out every other sound when he was burned. He only knows he screamed at the Agni Kai because of how sore his voice felt afterward.

He wonders how many people Jet has lost to fire. More than Zuko, certainly. Much more.

“Burn salves sometimes have lavender in them,” Zuko offers. He doesn’t know if he’s ever told anyone this. “I guess because sometimes burns can smell kind of—bad, so. I don’t know. There was this antiseptic salve I used to have to use, with lavender, and it smelled... it was the same as the perfume that woman had on, before.”

Zuko waits for another wave of nausea to pass. He doesn’t know why he feels the need to explain himself—Jet clearly already gets it—but he does. “It still got infected, and I thought I’d lose my eye.”

He’s definitely never told anyone that. He’s never needed to; the only other people he would tell were already there and already know.

“Shit,” says Jet.

It’s weird, sitting with that, acknowledging how frightened he’d been at the time. Like an animal, just a hunk of meat on a swaying ship’s exam table, not a prince or a son or a nephew, but something baser, something undignified, terrified of the darkness, of having a hole in his face. Terrified of the pain he was already in and the pain that would come, later, before he was ready for it.

His father made him feel that way. His family made hundreds of _thousands_ of people feel that way, over a hundred years—

Zuko says, “I didn’t lose it, so. It could have been worse.”

Jet takes another drag. “That’s a stupid thing to say. It could always be worse.”

Jet doesn’t know the half of it, Zuko thinks. Or, maybe he does. Maybe so many of these people here, the refugees, maybe they do. Maybe that’s the problem.

Zuko can’t pretend he’s going to eat anymore. He puts his bowl down on the table and rises. “I should get back.”

Jet stands up. “You shouldn’t. Just—take today off, you can apologize tomorrow.”

“I can’t,” Zuko says, “my uncle—”

“ _Forget_ about him for a minute,” Jet says, very loud, and Zuko realizes with a jolt that he’s angry. “Does he even know what people have been saying to you?”

“What can he do about it?” Zuko snaps. “Who cares? I can’t avoid perfume, I can’t mouth off at every single person who has an opinion on my face.” Not that he hasn’t tried, when he had more power, but still. It’s not like he’s a victim, it’s not like he has a scar for no reason. “It is what it is.”

“That’s _fucking stupid_ ,” Jet says again, stomping his cigarette out underfoot, looking a bit wild. “That’s not fair. _Nothing_ about this place is fair. Everyone here is so damn _ignorant_.”

A few passersby glance over at the volume before moving on. For a second, Zuko is afraid Jet will start yelling about the war, like the sad people Zuko has seen on street corners getting dragged away by the Dai Li. He mentally braces himself for it, tries wildly to think of something to say or do to get them both out of public, to de-escalate—spirits, Zuko isn’t sure he even knows how to de-escalate, only the opposite—but Jet doesn’t. He paces a bit, fists clenching at his sides, and then he throws himself back down onto the bench like it’s personally affronted him. Zuko wonders vaguely if that’s how he himself has looked, pacing the deck of his ship those long years, so much fury and nowhere to put it.

“I like your face the way it is,” Jet says determinedly, and then again, at Zuko’s sharp, confused look, “I do.”

Zuko, for lack of anything better, says, “Okay.”

“And everyone’s just gonna have to deal with it,” Jet goes on. “Including you.”

Zuko says, again, “Okay.”

He can’t handle the look on Jet’s face, suddenly, can’t handle not knowing what his own expression looks like, so he walks over and pulls Jet up by the hand, probably yanks harder than he means to, holding tight. 

Jet stumbles, a bit. “Li?”

“I do have to get back,” Zuko says, because he does. He spent three messy years following his own whims and now he owes it to his uncle, and to himself maybe, to at least try to make a life. He has to grit his teeth and he has to go back to work. “You can come back with me. If you want.”

He doesn’t look at Jet when he speaks, but he feels Jet’s hand go still in his own for a moment before squeezing back. “Yeah, sure,” Jet says. “I’ll come with you.”

  
  
  


Pao’s upset about the delivery, of course, and the loss of both a customer and inventory, but Uncle Iroh isn’t. Uncle Iroh peers at Zuko curiously when he walks in without dropping Jet’s hand, peers at Zuko curiously the rest of the afternoon as he (badly) makes up an excuse for the failed delivery and leaves Jet at a table in the far corner, shuffling about to finish his work.

Jet waves at Uncle every time he glances over. 

“Would your friend like to join us for tea this evening?” Uncle asks in the back room.

“He’s in a teashop, Uncle, he could have tea now if he wants it,” Zuko answers, hauling a crate onto the top shelf.

“Dinner, then,” Uncle says.

Zuko dusts off his hands. He says, “Okay.”

  
  
  


Dinner is weird. Jet is aggressively charming and personable, and Uncle is aggressively good-natured and personable, and Zuko is... himself: neither charming, nor good-natured, nor personable, and trying very hard not to be aggressive, but somehow still wanted, there, by the both of them, at least for the moment.

It’s nice.

  
  
  


When it comes time for Jet to leave, he drags Zuko out around the side of the front door, out of sight, and kisses him long and slow against the wall of the apartment building, until Zuko’s knees are weak.

He says, “Come to my place tomorrow.”

“Is this what does it for you?” Zuko jokes, a little breathlessly, shocked at himself that he’s able to joke at all. “Dinner with a tea shop boy and his uncle?”

“You’re not just a tea shop boy,” Jet grins, and he kisses the scarred side of Zuko’s face, and then his mouth, and then he hoists himself away from the wall like it takes great effort. “But thanks for dinner.”

“Yeah,” Zuko murmurs, watching him go.

When he comes back inside, Uncle Iroh takes one look at him and then turns back around very quickly, shoulders hunched like he’s trying not to laugh.

  
  


* * *

  
  


On another night, like so many other nights in Ba Sing Se, Jet presses his body close to Zuko and murmurs, “Let me tell you what I like about you.”

Zuko, breathless already and in no mood to argue, just nods. When Jet speaks, though, Zuko doesn’t listen; just lets the soft warmth of Jet’s voice wash over him, lets it carry his thoughts away until they are a pleasant nothing. 

That night Zuko dreams of two dragons, one red and one blue, but they fade away too quickly for him to hear them. By the morning his skin has cooled, and he doesn’t remember the dream.

.


	3. A Week in Ba Sing Se

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, sorry for the delay!! I ended up revamping quite a lot of my outline and reordering a bunch of things, which meant I had to rewrite most of this chapter and the next one. It also means this is going to overall be even longer than I was expecting, which... hopefully is a good thing? (And not that I'm just getting too wordy?) Anyway, thanks for your patience!

.

Sometimes, Zuko imagines what his life would have been like if things had gone differently.

It’s not something he ever allowed himself to do, before becoming a refugee, both because he’d never seen the point and because he never seemed to have the time. Now, he’s got an abundance of time, somehow, impossibly, even though some days feel as though they only have room for tea-serving and sleep. He’s still got time.

So Zuko imagines: If he had succeeded in capturing the Avatar that first time—or the time after that, or the time after that—that maybe he would have been welcomed home. Maybe he’d be there, now, adorned again in silk, with a real headpiece, feeling the kind of bone-deep satisfaction that comes from victory, from making a wrong right again; the kind he’s never felt before.

He imagines: If the Avatar had never reappeared as a child from a long-dead nation, maybe Zuko would still be pacing the deck of his ship, angry, the way he still is but can no longer show, caught halfway between that anger and a deep despair that he’s only just now learning how to recognize. Maybe he would have never learned.

He imagines: If he had never spoken out of turn at that meeting, if he’d never attended it in the first place—maybe he’d still be home, unscarred and knowing he was doing the right thing because he’d be doing as he was told. He’d be home and he’d be whole and he thinks he’d be angry, still, and full of despair, because that had started long before he could remember, hadn’t it. Angry and full of despair and full of honor that threatens to be stripped from him at any moment, wearing silks and eating fine foods and never thinking twice about any of it.

Zuko imagines: If he had decided to go after the Avatar the day he’d found the poster—what then? He still doesn’t know why he didn’t, why he hasn’t. It makes him dizzy to think about.

In other lives, Zuko did all these things and more. In this life, he spends his afternoon off with his chin propped up by his hands on an Earth Kingdom boy’s bedroll, watching said Earth Kingdom boy attempt to carve something out of a small chunk of wood. 

Apparently, Longshot has been trying to teach Jet how to make some kind of whistle out of it, and this is Jet’s third attempt. It just looks like a shapeless lump to Zuko.

(In all of those other lives and in this one, Zuko’s father continues to burn the world in the name of saving it, or maybe not even that; continues to burn the families of the kinds of people Zuko serves tea to during the day, the kind of person Zuko pulls close and runs his hands over because he’s allowed to, here. In all those lives and in this one, Zuko doesn’t quite understand this, not yet.)

Jet just lounges around half-dressed when it gets too hot in his apartment—even while trying to carve a whistle out of wood with a very sharp knife—because of course he does.

“How did you get that?” Zuko finally asks, jerking his chin in the direction of a stark, raised scar along the side of Jet’s ribs, lighter than the rest of his skin. Jet pauses his carving and twists a little to see, as if he’s forgotten it’s there.

“Oh,” Jet says. “Fell.”

“‘Fell’?” Zuko repeats. 

Jet grins, as he does. “I’m flattered you were expecting some heroic story—”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were, don’t lie,” Jet says, smug. “Imagining me in action? That get your knees weak, sweetheart?”

“Don’t call me that.”

Jet reaches forward with the hand holding his shapeless-lump-of-wood to poke Zuko in the shoulder with it. Zuko swats it away.

“Sorry to disappoint, but yeah. I just fell. I was little. Hurt like a bitch.” Jet smiles again, sharp. “Anyway, I’m way too good in a fight for anyone else to get a hit in like that.”

That’s obviously a lie, considering Jet has plenty of other scars, and especially if Jet did indeed get as encased in ice by the water tribe girl as he claims, but Zuko doesn’t think he’s expected to believe it. Anyway, it isn’t difficult for Zuko to imagine Jet staying light on his feet in a real fight, avoiding injury. He _is_ good. 

“Except for me,” Zuko says, embarrassed the second it comes out of his mouth. What exactly is he doing? _Flirting_?

But Jet seems to like it enough, setting his knife and his wood to the side so he can run his hand down Zuko’s spine like that’s just a normal thing they do. Which it is. “Except for you,” Jet agrees. “You can get a hit in on me any time you like.”

Zuko turns over on his back and watches Jet’s mouth instead of his eyes. “You’ll regret saying that,” he says, maybe more seriously than he really means to. 

Jet runs his hand over the clasps of Zuko’s robe. “Nah.”

Though Zuko is aware that Jet wants to know, Jet doesn’t really _ask_ about Zuko’s scar anymore. Not since before the time Jet ran into him on the street and hightailed it away like Zuko was something frightening or disgusting. Not since before he came back to the teashop like an apology, for some reason Zuko still isn’t sure about. Not since before he admitted that he knows Zuko isn’t who he’s pretending to be.

Not since before he said he wanted to see Zuko anyway.

Zuko still isn’t sure how much, exactly, Jet knows, or how. For once in his life he doesn’t think he _wants_ to find out.

“Said I was gonna take you to another play or something,” Jet says eventually, apparently having had his fill of kissing. “Let’s go.”

“You’ll have to put more clothes on first.”

“I know.” Jet puts a hand up to his head, mimes swooning. “So disappointing for you.”

Zuko kicks him in the back of the leg.

  
  
  
  


Zuko wakes two hours before dawn with the taste of almost-fire fading on his lips.

Jet is still asleep, so Zuko doesn’t think he yelled.

Zuko very rarely wakes like this, mid-dream, on the nights he spends here. He hates when he does, hates the quiet and the sound of breathing next to him and how weird and calm it makes him feel. Of everything else they’ve done, laying here in the quiet of night is what feels the most disconcertingly intimate.

So Zuko gets up, fumbles about on the floor for his outer clothes, for some water; he’s so spirits-damned _thirsty_ all the time anymore. It would be easier to find everything with a flame, but he can’t risk that.

“What are you doing?” Jet grumbles from the bed, voice thick still with sleep. “Are you _leaving_?”

“I’m just looking for water,” Zuko says, which is only a half-lie, and his hand finally lands on one of the jugs Jet keeps below his shelves. 

“Don’t leave, the Dai Li are out,” Jet says, a bit less sleepily. “They were up on the roof of this building the other day.”

That would be worrisome, except they’ve also been on Zuko’s roof, and nothing’s ever come of that yet. He wonders where else they go.

He drinks his fill of water, and then he awkwardly drops his bundle of clothes back on the floor and slides back into the bed. He stares up at the ceiling.

Jet turns. “Stop thinking so loud, you’ll hurt yourself.”

The thought comes to Zuko suddenly— _that sounds like something my sister would say_ —so he says it out loud, because at some point over the past few months he stopped bothering to filter his words in front of Jet.

“You have a sister?” Jet asks, into the darkness.

“Yeah,” Zuko answers, slightly disturbed by the fact that he can just say that when he hasn’t even thought about Azula in weeks and weeks. 

Azula and Jet aren’t very much alike, except where they are: in words and tone and turn of phrase that comes easily to them where it’s always eluded Zuko. In the surety of who they are, of their own competence, where Zuko has always felt he’s needed to prove his worth.

Azula always lies. Jet lies sometimes, Zuko is pretty sure. He doesn’t know how much of it has been to Zuko.

“So did I,” Jet breathes, anchoring Zuko back down to the present, to the dark and the too-small bedroll and the nighttime sounds of an overcrowded city outside. “I had two.”

All the breath leaves Zuko, for just a moment. It hurts. Neither of them say anything. Then:

“I’m sorry,” Zuko says, because he is.

“Got two different siblings, now,” Jet says, and he hasn’t moved; his voice isn’t any different than it was a minute ago, just light, conversational. “Used to have more, but. These two, they’re still here, even after I messed up. So.”

Zuko has the urge to do something, like raise his arm, reach out and touch Jet in a way they don’t usually touch, but he doesn’t know how. 

“Your sister,” Jet says.

Zuko had actually seen Azula not that long ago, compared to the long stretch of time in which he hadn’t seen her at all. “She’s not a refugee,” he murmurs, unsure how exactly Jet will interpret it. “She probably...” _Wants me dead_ is on the tip of his tongue, but something stops him from saying it. “She probably doesn’t think about me at all.”

It’s still just about two hours from dawn. Beneath the blanket, Jet takes Zuko’s hand, threads their fingers together.

Zuko closes his eyes and sleeps.

  
  


* * *

On his ship, after he’d healed as much as he was going to, Zuko had accepted his fate as something unavoidable and just, and he steeled himself, and he got on with it. For nearly three years, he got on with it.

There’s nothing really to _get on with_ in Ba Sing Se. There’s just living, and Zuko still isn’t entirely sure how to do that. He doesn’t feel like he’s earned it.

He hasn’t seen the Avatar since running into him the last time. He doesn’t know if he or his group are still in Ba Sing Se. He tries not to to think about it.

Zuko considers that he should probably see some kind of doctor about the fevers—still flaring but not always so intense, anymore, that he can’t hide them—but he’s worried that it’s really just his inner flame acting up, no matter how much Uncle promises he’ll be fine with meditation alone, and any kind of healer would instantly know. Zuko doesn’t know enough about whether firebender physiology is different enough to make that a possibility, but he doesn’t want to risk it. He can handle feeling a little dizzy and hot every so often, he can handle the lack of sleep, it isn’t anything he hasn’t dealt with before—

Uncle sets down a plate of cut fruit beside him while Zuko is elbow-deep in dishes and halfway to dozing. The sound of it jerks him back to wakefulness.

Zuko glances at it, the little pile of perfectly-square yellow cubes. He clears his throat. “What’s that for?”

“It’s for you to eat,” Uncle says. “When you’re done with dishes.”

Zuko squints at the plate as he scrubs. “Where did you get mango? Did you buy it just now?”

“Yes, on my break,” Uncle answers. Then, to Zuko’s scowl, “Nephew, it is fine, we had enough for it, you need to relax about the budget.”

“I’ll relax when I have a reason to relax,” Zuko grumbles.

“If only he was so dedicated to tea serving,” Pao comments from the cupboard, which makes Zuko narrow his eyes, but by the way Uncle chuckles he assumes it wasn’t meant as negatively as it sounds.

“I’d be more dedicated if you paid me more,” Zuko chances anyway.

“I’ll pay you more when you do better work,” Pao shoots back, still from inside the cupboard.

Zuko narrowly avoids shattering a dish against the bottom of the sink. “Uncle’s dedicated and he makes much better tea than you, how about you pay _him_ more.”

Uncle elbows Zuko in the ribs. “We are, of course, just grateful to have such steady work as refugees!” he says loudly, as Pao pokes his head back out of the cupboard, looking distracted.

“Of course, of course—Mushi, can you check these shipments for me? I’m not convinced they sent me the right blends.”

“Eat,” Uncle says to Zuko again as he ambles over to help Pao sort through crates. “You haven’t been eating enough.”

That’s probably true—Zuko’s appetite these days comes in fits and spurts—so when he’s finished with the washing and drying he takes a cube of mango from the plate.

By the time Uncle comes back out of the pantry and Zuko has wandered back up front to take orders, most of the plate is gone.

  
  
  
  


Customers are customers, so Zuko is still fighting a losing battle not to scowl when he approaches the back table to find Jin sitting there.

“Hi, Li,” she says, brightly, before he can even process that it’s her. “Bad day?”

“I’d be happy to take your order,” Zuko says automatically. Then, “Uh, I mean, it’s fine.”

Jin laughs. “People can be the worst, can’t they?”

Zuko has no idea of the proper thing to say back to that. “They want a lot of tea,” he says. “All the time. And I’m supposed to bring it to them.”

“That’s the worst,” Jin says, nodding.

Zuko... stands in front of the table. Jin grimaces a bit.

“I’m sorry,” she says, smiling again, self-conscious. “I’m being so weird. It’s just—I work in my family’s flower shop, so I know how overwhelming customer service can get. Your uncle comes in sometimes. He’s a good customer, though!”

Ah, Zuko thinks. So that’s where Uncle keeps getting the plants.

“Are you okay?” Jin asks.

“Yes,” Zuko says, slowly, trying to gather his thoughts, “I just, I don’t understand why you’re... here.”

Jin smiles a little, pursing her lips like she’s trying not to. It reminds Zuko, suddenly and inexplicably, of Mai, although Jin and Mai are nothing alike, and Mai likely would have sooner stabbed herself in the leg than ever let it show on her face in public that she had felt the urge to smile.

Jin says, amusement in her voice, “Are you always like this?”

Zuko doesn’t really know what to say to that.

“Sorry,” Jin goes on, looking it. “That came out mean, I didn’t mean it like that. I know you already turned me down, I understand. I just thought that maybe we could be friends.” She smiles a little wider. “Also, your uncle gave me these coupons the last time he was at my shop, and the tea here _is_ very good.”

Zuko’s first, automatic thought is that he doesn’t need or want friends, but for some reason he doesn’t say it.

“I know you said you’re dating someone,” Jin says again, taking his silence maybe for something else. “I really do understand! I just... I think you’re funny, and it looked like you could use...” She pauses, clamps her mouth down around whatever else she was going to say. “Well, _I_ could sure use a friend.”

“So could my nephew!” Uncle bellows from the back.

Zuko can’t help himself. “Stop eavesdropping, old man!”

“You’re not quiet,” Pao says, also from the back, and Zuko rapidly catalogues every other conversation he’s ever had with Jet in this teashop that could have been overheard. He hopes to every spirit on every plane of existence that those _weren’t_ overheard.

Then he mentally curses whatever weird bond his boss and his uncle have been nurturing lately that seems to do nothing for their pocketbooks but _everything_ for Zuko’s chronic eye twitch. 

“Li,” Pao calls again, “be her friend or not, I don’t care, but take her order and get back to work!”

When Zuko turns back around, Jin’s eyes have gone very wide. She has that look on her face again, like she’s trying not to smile. “Sorry,” she breathes. “Sometimes I can talk kind of loud. Um. Do you want me to leave?”

“No, you can stay,” Zuko says, somehow meaning it. He takes her coupon, stuffs it into his apron. “I’ll get you the special green tea.”

Zuko still doesn't understand what’s so special about it, but it’s the fussiest tea to brew. 

Uncle will still probably enjoy making it.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Zuko wakes in the middle of the night, _again_ , and this time he does yell. He cuts himself off the second he’s fully aware, but it still wakes up Uncle.

“Nothing’s wrong, I’m fine,” Zuko mutters before Uncle has even sat all the way up.

“Would you like some tea?” Uncle asks anyway, voice groggy.

Zuko groans as he rubs the sleep out of his eyes. “No.”

“What were you dreaming about?”

“ _Nothing_ ,” Zuko says. “I’m hungry, I’m going to go eat something.”

“I can make you some—”

“You don’t need to get up, I can handle _eating_ by myself.” Zuko hauls himself up and out of bed, feeling like dead weight all over. “Go back to sleep.”

“Okay, then,” Uncle says sleepily. “If you’re sure.” 

Uncle rolls back over, grimacing a bit as he moves the shoulder that had been wounded by Azula’s strike. 

Zuko stands for a moment in the doorway, watching. Then he unclenches his teeth and walks away, toward the cupboards.

They do have food—a half-full bag of rice, various cooking oils and marinades, some dried mushrooms, another mango, some seafood snacks that Zuko still side-eyes for being sub-par to the kind he could get at ports, among other things. He could grab something extra now and they’d still be fine until their next shopping trip. Uncle might want the mango, though.

Zuko closes the cupboards without taking anything, drops into the seat by the window, and waits for morning.

* * *

“Oh good, you’re back!” Uncle exclaims one evening just as Zuko is opening the door. The smell of something spicy hits Zuko square in the face. “I’m making that stew you like, and I managed to find some peppers that were spicier than the usual, I know you’ve been looking for them. There’s more fruit, too. You said you aren’t going out tonight?”

“I’m not.” Zuko closes the door cautiously, peering at his uncle’s smiling face. “What’s gotten into you?”

Uncle stirs the pot happily. “Can’t a man take care of his beloved nephew without an ulterior motive?”

“What did you buy?” Zuko asks immediately. “Uncle, if you got another scroll—”

“I just thought you would like a nice stew and some fruit,” Uncle insists, as Zuko toes off his shoes and scans the small apartment for new trinkets.

He flings his arm out towards the far wall, where a scroll with a painting of a very elegant lady holding a basket of flowers is now hanging. “That one wasn’t here before!”

Uncle doesn’t even flinch. “It brightens up the place.”

“We don’t need brightening!” Zuko groans. “We need _food_.”

“Which we _have_ , calm yourself,” Uncle says.

“How much? Did you check the cupboard?”

“Yes.”

“Did you check the budget?”

“ _Yes_ , Nephew,” Uncle sighs. “We are doing fine, just as we have been. Look, the stew is ready. Let’s eat!”

“Did you burn it?”

“Does it smell burnt to you?”

“You burn everything except tea—”

“I did not burn it.” Uncle pushes Zuko away from their little stove. “Sit down, sit down, already.”

“It better be good,” Zuko grumbles, sitting at the table as he’s been told. “I don’t believe you, that you checked the budget.”

“Nephew,” Uncle says, placatingly, spooning stew into two bowls, “it is _fine_. Do you really think I would spend so much money that I’d let you starve?”

“No,” Zuko answers immediately. “But you’d let _yourself_ go without to get a—a pai sho tile or a plant, or a painting of some _lady_ you’ve never met. You’d let yourself almost die for what _might possibly be tea_ —”

“I didn’t almost die,” Uncle says.

“You ate a poisonous plant.”

“An honest mistake, resolved by your quick thinking in locating a healer,” Uncle says. “I would not make the same mistake again.”

Zuko crosses his arms. “Yes, you would.”

“Please, I am not as stupid as you think I am,” Uncle says, good-naturedly, setting the steaming bowls down and taking a seat on the other side of the table.

“Neither am I,” Zuko snaps. 

Something flashes across Uncle’s face for just a moment. Then, he closes his eyes briefly, and smiles. “Yes, I bought another scroll. Mental well-being is just as important as physical well-being. We _can_ achieve both here. I would not have my nephew living in a place entirely devoid of cheer if I can help it.”

Zuko scowls. “I don’t need cheer.”

“You desperately do,” says Uncle. “Eat this before it gets cold.”

Zuko does. It is, he has to admit rather irritably, delicious. 

  
  


* * *

There are many things Zuko can’t do in Ba Sing Se, but there are also things he _can_ do. He can do tasks by rote and let his mind wander to places it hasn’t been in years. He can blend into a crowd and feel pleasantly anonymous. He can _date_ someone. 

He’s not supposed to, but he _can_ practice with his dao close to dusk in the agrarian zone, once everyone has started to head back home. He _can_ sneak out at night as the Blue Spirit to track the Dai Li’s movements, since he’s waking up so often anyway, just to make sure they’re staying clear. 

(Technically, he promised Uncle he wouldn’t do things like that, but Zuko wonders and worries sometimes about his Uncle’s level of common sense. If Zuko doesn’t make sure they’re safe, who would?)

He can stand around an abandoned warehouse—it really is abandoned this time, Jet checked, it _is_ , stop worrying so much—with people roughly his own age, and very seriously consider doing something reckless just for _fun_.

“Nobody’s that strong except maybe Pipsqueak,” Smellerbee argues, which is a sentence that makes almost zero sense to Zuko. “You’d break your foot.”

“No I wouldn’t,” Zuko argues back. “I’ve done something like it before.”

“Then you broke your foot doing it,” says Smellerbee. Beside her, Longshot is studying the dusty table in front of them with a look of utmost concentration. He taps one of the legs with the toe of his boot, then looks over at Smellerbee. “See, Longshot agrees with me.”

Zuko frowns. “I didn’t break anything except what I meant to break. My foot’s fine.”

“Then show us.”

“I’m not showing you my foot.”

“Show us that you can _do_ it,” Jet clarifies, amused daring in his voice.

Something like fire—but not quite, not angry enough—shoots through Zuko’s veins. He shoves his way past Jet and Smellerbee and Longshot, and stands in front of the old table. He takes a moment to examine it.

Then he swings his leg up and kicks down so hard the table cracks in half and falls beneath his heel.

Behind him, Smellerbee whoops and Jet bursts into uncontrollable laughter. Longshot starts up a slow clap.

“Man, are you _serious_ ,” Jet manages after a moment, while something very self-satisfied rolls around in Zuko’s chest. “Man, Li, are you _serious_? That is the funniest thing I’ve ever _seen_.”

“Told you I have a good high kick,” says Zuko.

“Why would you even need to know how to do that?” Jet sighs, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “Spirits. I need to see you do that again. I need you to _teach me_ to do that.”

“If you can get high enough it’s really just more about momentum—”

“I am not nearly that flexible.”

“Do you want me to teach you or not?”

“Show me you didn’t break your foot just now,” Smellerbee demands, shoving past Jet. “Come on, walk on it—”

“It’s fine!” Zuko yells, feeling something strangely satisfying in his chest as he takes an obligatory limp-less stroll around the broken table. It’s been so long since he’s gotten to _yell_ about anything. “Why would I be stupid enough to break my own foot?”

“You’re a teenage boy,” says Smellerbee, even as Longshot knocks her lightly on the shoulder with his fist. “Of _course_ you’d do something that stupid.”

“Like you’ve never done something stupid,” says Jet. “What about the time you—”

“We’re not talking about me!”

“We are now.”

They bicker, the three of them—even Longshot, somehow, silently—like people who know each other very well. Zuko watches.

  
  
  
  


Back in the lower ring, the four of them crowd around a small table near a food stall selling the best bread buns Zuko has ever eaten. Zuko has budgeted enough for one bun for himself, and that’s all he buys.

Longshot comes back to the table with three more, plus several kebabs. Several hands dig in. Zuko holds his bun closer to himself.

Jet lights a cigarette. Smellerbee makes a face. "Jet, you're gross."

“Oh, come on,” Jet complains, a note of amusement in his voice. “Think of it as a trade-off. I don’t do half the shit I used to do.”

Smellerbee’s eyes flick to Zuko for just a second. “Don’t you?”

Jet’s expression turns dark. “What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

Longshot’s hands fall on both Smellerbee and Jet’s shoulders as they stare each other down, and Zuko has the distinct feeling he’s missing something.

“I was kidding,” Smellerbee says eventually. “ _Kidding_. Sheesh. Sorry.” She stuffs a bun in her mouth, talks around it. “I like you, Li,” said like Zuko should be honored, “it’s just that we came here to start a new life together and Jet spends _so_ much time with you.”

Zuko doesn’t have the wherewithal to hide his flush, not that he ever does. He has the sudden, insane urge to apologize for inadvertently monopolizing their friend, but Jet beats him to it. “Sorry, sorry. You know how I get.”

Smellerbee sighs. “Yeah, I _do_.”

“Since Li isn’t in our crew—”

“Because he said he didn’t want to be,” Smellerbee interrupts, voice unexpectedly sharp, and for a moment Jet looks thrown. 

He recovers quickly, though, and turns his head, blowing smoke away from the table. “Yeah, and I respected that. Didn’t I?”

Smellerbee’s sharp gaze turns to Zuko, who wishes he knew what in the world this was about. “Uh. Yeah. He did?” Zuko says. He did, in fact. None of what they’ve been doing has anything to do with joining any kind of crew. At least, Zuko didn’t _think_ so—

“I did,” Jet repeats, and Smellerbee must see whatever she was looking for in his face, because her posture finally softens. Longshot hands her a kebab.

  
  
  


“How much did you tell your friends about me?” Zuko asks later, when they’ve parted ways, when Zuko is allowing Jet to walk with him back towards home.

“Enough,” Jet says, nonchalantly. He lowers his voice. “Well, you know, when the whole—when I realized your name isn’t Li, I already told you I talked to them about you.”

Whatever _that_ means, because Zuko still hasn’t outright asked more about it, _because_ Jet gave him an out, didn’t he. Jet said it was fine and he didn’t want to know, and Zuko has so far taken him at his word. 

He can’t decide if this choice is wise self-preservation or just plain cowardice.

“Do they hate me?” Zuko asks.

Jet turns his head sharply. “What? No.”

“All of that, back there—”

“That was about me and Smellerbee,” Jet says. “And some stuff I used to do, that’s all. They definitely don’t hate you.”

Zuko stops briefly by a lamp post. He wants to ask about the _stuff_ Jet used to do, but he isn’t sure he has the right. “Why do you want to see me?”

Jet comes up around his right side, leans against the lamp post with his hands in his pockets. “What do you mean, ‘why’?”

It’s a question he’s asked before. Zuko understands it even less than the last time.

“I mean,” Zuko struggles. “ _Why_?”

Jet grins, the real one Zuko has been seeing more of lately. “Li, stop _thinking_ so hard. I already told you. Because I like you.”

Zuko knows that—he does—but it doesn’t seem like a good enough reason. “You don’t even know—you don’t know who I am, not really.”

Jet’s face softens a bit. He shrugs. “You could tell me.”

Zuko has thought about it. His throat feels tight. “No. I can’t.”

“Okay. Well,” Jet looks down at Zuko’s hands, clenched at his sides, “what if I guess?”

That might be worse.

Zuko starts walking again, briskly. It takes Jet a few seconds to catch up.

“Hey, Li, wait, come on—what’d I do?”

“Nothing,” Zuko says through his teeth. “You didn’t do anything.”

“Then why are you—hey.” Jet starts a bit as Zuko grabs his wrist, but doesn’t protest when Zuko drags him down an alley a block away from the apartment he shares with Uncle, where there are no windows, where it’s unlikely they’ll be overheard.

He’s clutching at Jet’s hands maybe a little harder than he needs to. “Tell me you like me again,” he murmurs, unsure why it seems so vitally important right this second, especially when he already _knows_ Jet does. His heart feels like it might pound right out of his chest and take flight. 

Jet’s fingers twitch a bit in Zuko’s grip. Zuko tries to loosen his hold.

Jet steps further into the space between them.

“I like you,” Jet says quietly, very close. “I really do.” He pulls one hand from Zuko’s grip, runs it down Zuko’s arm. “And I know you’re trying to make a fresh start, like me.”

Zuko doesn’t look up. He feels like he’s floating. “I don’t know what I’m trying to do.”

“Well, you got time to figure it out.”

“I don’t think I do.”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“I’m _not_.” Zuko breathes, looks down again at their two joined hands.

“Hey,” Jet goes on, “I _decided_ to keep on seeing you.” Zuko does look up, then, to see Jet with an expression on his face like he’s in on some joke Zuko’s too slow to pick up on. “What, you saying I made the wrong choice?”

The thing is—Zuko’s heart pounds—the thing is, he doesn’t know, really. Zuko _wants_ it to have been the right choice. He wants it very badly. He wants to be worthy and he also wants to stomp on the part of him that dares think he wasn’t already, being born a prince. 

He wants Jet to know who he is. He wants to hear these words again, with Jet knowing who he is. Not suspecting, not existing in this weird liminal space where they are both aware of how much isn’t being said, but _knowing_.

He had not predicted, when this entire thing between them first started, that he would _ever_ want Jet to know him that way.

The urge to spill it all fizzles out almost as quickly as it came on, though. 

“No, but I don’t—I don’t know.” Zuko is dizzy, suddenly, the way it keeps coming over him lately. He lets his head fall forward to rest against Jet’s shoulder, allowing the tension in the air to slide away along with his exhale. “I don’t know what I’m upset about.”

“Li,” Jet says, sounding unsure as he so rarely does, hands gentle on Zuko’s arms, “it’s a good thing, right? That we like each other?”

“Yeah,” Zuko breathes, because maybe it isn’t, but he wants it to be.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Zuko dreams of two dragons, one red and one blue. He sits between them on a throne with his face whole, and his hair long and black, and his body draped in so many silks that he can’t move. 

_Never forget who you are_ , says the red dragon. It’s not his mother’s voice but it is her words, the last thing she’d ever said to him, so it must have been important. It must _be_ important.

When he wakes, it’s to an empty bedroom, and the kind of thirst he hasn’t felt since drifting on a raft in the northern sea.

Uncle gets up from the table as Zuko is gulping down water straight from the faucet. When Zuko straightens up, he puts the back of his hand up to Zuko’s head. Zuko shoves him off.

“I’m _fine_.”

“You’re not,” says Uncle. “Come sit and talk with your old Uncle.”

He walks back over to the table, sits; looks up at Zuko expectantly, patiently. Zuko, with a burst of contrarian annoyance, stays standing over by the sink. “You never used to make me talk about things.”

“I am not making you do anything,” says Uncle.

“You never used to even _ask_ to talk.”

“Of course I did,” Uncle says. Then, “Maybe not so outright. I am trying to do things differently in Ba Sing Se.”

Zuko has been desperate to talk, of course. So desperate that the words sometimes climb up his throat all at once and get stuck there, threatening to choke him. He doesn’t know who he is anymore, he can barely sleep through any given night, the things he used to think were important are no longer important and the things he used to think were superfluous flights of fancy are now very important indeed, and he doesn’t know what to _do_ about any of it. He desperately needs to talk.

“I don’t want to talk,” Zuko says. “I’m going back to bed.”

“At least have some tea,” Uncle argues. “You have a fever again. I’ll worry about you.”

Zuko sighs. He walks over to the table. He sits. Uncle smiles.

Zuko drinks some damn tea. His body aches a little less for it.

“The Avatar is still in Ba Sing Se,” Uncle says after a time.

Zuko avoids his eyes. “Good to know.”

Uncle looks at him expectantly. Zuko looks at the stupid, beautiful scroll with the painting of a plant on it that he let Uncle hang up by the window. He hates it. 

“So you really,” Uncle starts, then seems to rethink. He takes a long sip of his tea. “Is there any particular _reason_ that you are not going to attempt to pursue the Avatar?”

“I thought you wanted me to stop.” Zuko pats his hair down, absentmindedly, from where it had started to stick up from sleep. Has he really been walking around like that since he woke up? His longer hair never used to get so _unruly_. “Do you not want me to stop?”

“No, that’s not what I am saying,” Uncle says, very quickly. “It is just not what I was expecting, and I am trying to follow your line of reasoning for not doing it.”

“Because I would fail at it,” Zuko says immediately. “Because I’m a failure.”

Uncle frowns. “Nephew.”

“There isn’t any point,” Zuko goes on, struck with sudden clarity. “It wouldn’t work, nothing I do ever works, so why bother? I’ll just... pretend I never saw any of it. I’m just going to live here in Ba Sing Se and, and, make _tea_ or maybe not even _that_ because that’s another thing I’m bad at—”

“Nephew—”

“And maybe _one_ day,” Zuko goes on, louder, “I’ll just settle down and become a butler for a wealthy family, if any of them can stand to look at me! Won’t that be a step up!”

“ _Zuko,_ ” Uncle says, and his frown has turned disapproving. 

Zuko doesn’t want to see it. “And you don’t have to call me that anymore. I’m just a refugee.”

Tense silence. Zuko stares down at his half-full tea cup, angry, angry, the only thing he’s good at being. He says, “Go ahead, I can tell you’re disappointed.”

Uncle Iroh sighs, one of the long ones he used to do a lot back when Zuko was thirteen or fourteen and at the absolute height of his petulance. Back then, Zuko was in charge of a ship, and Uncle would let him stalk off wherever he needed to. 

“It is certainly disappointing to learn that you still hold little respect for those who are only trying to earn a humble living,” he says, which stings enough that Zuko feels properly cowed. “Nephew, has something else happened?”

“No.”

“Are you certain?”

“Just tell me why you think I’m making the wrong choice. I know you do.”

Uncle frowns. “I don’t think you are making the wrong choice. I had only hoped you had come to this decision because you had done some thinking about what you truly want.”

Zuko sits up straighter because it’s hard to breathe, suddenly. Funny how his uncle can always just _do_ that. “Since when does it matter what I want?”

“What? Of course it matters,” Uncle says loudly, flippantly, like Zuko has asked something absurd.

“No, seriously, when has it _ever_ mattered what I want?” Zuko says back just as loudly. “I didn’t _want_ to work in a teashop. I didn’t _want_ to live in Ba Sing Se.”

Uncle gives him a look. “Do not be deliberately obtuse.”

“I’m not!” Zuko says, temper flaring in earnest now. “You always think I’m doing this on purpose, I’m sorry I’m not _clever_ enough to get it immediately.”

Uncle Iroh sighs again, like he is exhausted, and a wave of humiliation so great that Zuko can barely withstand it crashes over him. He gets to his feet; walks toward the front door, then backtracks into the bedroom to grab his discarded outer robe from the pile near his bedroll, and starts dressing.

Uncle stands and watches from the sliding doorway, his brow furrowed. “What are you doing?”

“Getting ready to go out.”

“It’s the middle of the night!”

“It’s fine,” Zuko says curtly, tying the sash at his waist. “I know how the Dai Li patrol, I’ve been watching them, I won’t get caught.”

“You’ve been _watching_ them?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know, just out.”

He expects Uncle Iroh to let him go, leave him to his own devices as he always has before, but he doesn’t. He stops Zuko at the front door, closing it again before Zuko’s barely even opened it an inch. “You’re not going out. You have a fever.”

Zuko scowls. “Really? You’re going to stop me?”

“Yes,” Iroh says, more forcefully than Zuko is used to hearing from him. “Please, Nephew, _talk_ to me.”

“I don’t know what you _want_ ,” Zuko forces through his teeth. None of this makes any sense. “I thought you wanted to start over here, I thought you wanted me to _stop_ , and that’s what I’ve been _doing_ , and then—You start this conversation with me, and then you don’t like the answer, and now I can’t even _leave_?”

“Your sleep has been troubled for weeks,” Uncle says, maybe a little desperate. “You’re not eating enough, you’ve been ill—”

“I know, I’m _weak_.”

“You are not weak,” Uncle says decisively. “I would like to know what is troubling you.”

“I’m not troubled!” Uncle’s eyebrows furrow incredulously at that, and Zuko’s face feels hotter than the sun. “Nothing’s wrong, okay? Nothing other than, than, everything that’s _usually_ wrong, and—” and he’s furious again, _furious_ , “This just goes to show that it never _does_ matter what I want!”

“Nephew, I have been where you are,” Uncle plows on, as if he really does understand an iota of what goes through Zuko’s head when Zuko doesn’t even understand it himself. “It took me much soul-searching—”

“I’m not searching my soul, don’t be stupid,” Zuko interrupts, reaching for the door.

Uncle closes it again, giving Zuko a hard look. “Who are you, what do you want! These are the kinds of big questions you should be asking yourself!”

“ _Why_? What difference does it make?”

“It makes all the difference in the world!” Uncle cries, like this is something he’s been trying to say for ages and Zuko just missed it. “Are you going to be your own man, or someone else’s?”

“I don’t even know what that means!” Zuko says, agitated like he hasn’t been in what feels like years, how he used to feel all the time. “Just—move out of the way, I don’t know what you’re _talking about_.”

“Please, Nephew,” Uncle says again, deliberately, “please, for me, think about what _you_ want.”

Zuko can tell, as he so rarely can, that he is trying Uncle’s excessive patience. It makes him cold all over with guilt. 

Then, like a lightning strike, it makes him _hot_. 

“I _want_ to go home!” Zuko shouts, and his voice has reached a kind of fever-pitch it hasn’t gotten to in years. In the back of his mind there’s the dim worry that the neighbors might be able to hear, but he’s heard and ignored enough shouting matches on their ends that he isn’t sure they’d even bother to listen to him. “It’s the only thing I’ve _ever_ wanted, but that’s never going to happen! It doesn’t matter!”

He’s wanted so many things that didn’t matter, in the end. 

Zuko isn’t sure if it’s him, if it’s that he doesn’t want the right things, or if it’s just the same old song and dance, the unluckiness that follows him everywhere. He’s always had to work hard, and that used to mean something, when he believed it would reward him in the end.

He’s dizzy. The thought of actually leaving the apartment no longer sounds appealing, so he sits down on the floor, with his back against the wall.

Uncle follows him down, one hand outstretched, not quite touching his shoulder. “Zuko?”

“I’m tired of fighting,” Zuko says, embarrassed suddenly in the face of his uncle’s concern. “There’s no destiny for me, it’s not worth it anymore. I thought you’d be _happy_.”

His face is so _hot_ , and when he reaches up to press the heels of his hands into his eyes he’s back _there_ , suddenly, for no reason at all except that it had been triggered not so long ago, and sometimes these things come to him like ripple effects from a large blow, these tricks his brain plays on him that he’s never liked, the long shadows and the pressing in of people he does and doesn’t know and the _smell_ , he doesn’t think he’ll forget that for as long as he lives. Flesh and smoke and lavender antiseptic, later. That dreadful smell.

When his mind yanks him back to the present, the candles are flaring and his uncle’s hands are on his shoulders. For a second, it burns. “Don’t touch—don’t touch me,” Zuko hears himself say, and his uncle backs off immediately. Zuko drags in a painful breath.

There are a few stuttering moments of very tense quiet, the kind that happens more and more often the longer they’re in _fucking_ Ba Sing Se. There must be something about this city, that’s the only explanation—Zuko survived for years, _years_ , on a ship, banished from his home, and he had not fallen apart as often as he does now. He had survived years in places where he wasn’t worthy, wasn’t wanted. He had survived—anyway, he’d survived.

He should be able to handle a city. He should be able to handle a teashop, an apartment, an uncle who cares about what happens to him.

Zuko eventually manages, around what feels like rocks in his lungs, “Just tell me what you think I should do.”

Uncle Iroh stands there with such a strange, quiet devastation that Zuko thinks he could not look more stricken than if Zuko had actually reached over and slapped him. “I don’t want to tell you what to do.”

“But I’m obviously still not doing what you want.” Zuko is exhausted. “I can’t try if I don’t know what it is.”

Uncle looks sad, and Zuko, for the life of him, can’t figure out what he did wrong this time. He’s _trying_. “Ultimately, I want you to be happy, Prince Zuko,” Iroh answers. “If not now, then someday. What would make you truly happy?”

There was a time when Zuko might have been able to answer that quickly, but he isn’t sure it would’ve ever been honest. 

  
  
  
  


Uncle comes into the bedroom later, while Zuko is back in bed and dozing, once Zuko has calmed down enough that he’s embarrassed about how upset he’d been. Iroh’s hand drops to his brow like his mother’s used to, sometimes, when he was a child and ill. Zuko thinks he has a vague recollection of Iroh doing the same thing back when he was first burned, although he doesn’t remember much from that time.

He doesn’t push his uncle away, because it feels nice. It’s late, and he’s tired and ill, and he’s not a prince anymore anyway, so he’s allowed to feel a bit nice.

Uncle says, “I am so very sorry,” in that quietly devastated voice again, but Zuko isn’t entirely sure what he’s apologizing for.

“What would you have done, back on the ship, if I’d decided to stop?” Zuko asks, instead of acknowledging it. He keeps his eyes closed. “Just... stopped searching, gone off somewhere else?”

“I would have gone with you,” Uncle says, easily. His hand brushes Zuko’s hair back from his forehead. “I think you know that.”

Zuko does and he doesn’t. He knows his uncle would never hurt him, but he has never been completely certain, even now, that his uncle would not leave him. “Why?”

Uncle pauses for a minute, considering. He does that, sometimes, usually when he seems to think he might say something that will anger Zuko. After the evening they’ve had, Zuko can guess that he probably doesn’t want to push it any further than it’s already gone. His hand, though, doesn’t stop stroking Zuko’s hair. 

Zuko is a little bit revolted with himself for how much it comforts him. 

“Because I love you,” Uncle says, as if he’s ever just said it like that before, as if that’s something people say to each other at all.

Zuko has never had to earn his uncle’s love. He doesn’t know whether that’s good or bad. 

“That’s not a good enough reason.”

Uncle Iroh sighs. Zuko feels it more than he hears it, drifting near again to the edge of sleep.

“Oh, Prince Zuko,” Uncle murmurs. “Yes, it is.”

.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments would absolutely give me life if you feel up to it. <3
> 
> Also, there desperately needs to be more content for this ship. Come yell at me about it on tumblr! @madseason


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